To take advantage of the nice weather, we have been spending some extra time visiting our farm. We first joined this farm last year, and were spoiled by last summer's unusually perfect growing conditions - everything was a bumper crop, undisturbed by insects or blight or bad weather. This year has been a bit more of a mixed bag, the way it should be, I think. Nevertheless, the weather in late August and now early September has improved dramatically, and you can see the results. A few shot's from yesterday's visit:
Two weeks ago, you couldn't pay the tomatoes to ripen. Yesterday, an unbelievable abundance of heirlooms, plum tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes:
We also nabbed a big bunch of sunflowers to take home. They are growing all over the farm:
After moving away from the Pioneer Valley, visits like the one we had yesterday remind us of what we loved in spite of everything that made it difficult to live there. We enjoyed the beautiful weather and the spectacular views; got some good coffee that we've been struggling to find since being in Boston; and watched - now, with a satisfied sense of detachment - the hordes of undergraduates beginning their first day of classes at the local colleges.Once home, we spent the evening making and freezing a season's worth of pesto. Today, we do the same with our tomatoes, putting up sauce for the fall and winter. Speaking of tomatoes, it was interesting at the farm yesterday to overhear people who couldn't tell each variety of tomato apart. I have always been a fan of reading about the history of food and people's relationship(s) to it, and CP of late has also become a fan of this literature. Thus, we have been talking recently about how many Americans simply do not know how or what to eat anymore. Scary to think that we have entered an age in which a tomato seems more foreign to us than the pre-packaged, processed food that appears in every major grocery store. Scary, indeed.
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