Summer transforms the farm. Where spring is about starting our production — heads down in the greenhouse, hands in the soil — summer brings something else entirely: the delighted screams of kids on a wagon ride, the hunt for clues in a farm scavenger hunt, the particular joy of watching someone fall in love with a place you've tended for years. While we bring in the summer harvest and begin fall planting, we acknowledge two things can be true at once, and holding both — the work and the wonder — is what makes us better farmers and this farm a better host.
These past few weeks have offered both in abundance. Severe weather flooded our pumpkin fields (never fear — they soaked it up quickly, and as we've learned from previous years, our pumpkins can handle a good deep soak). And on the quieter mornings, before people arrive, barn swallows dancing through the cover crop fields make it hard to believe this is also a place of purposeful agricultural work.
Here is a window into both sides of summer farm life.
