Darn the weather

 The past two days have been quite busy around the farm.  We planted tomatoes in the greenhouse on Thursday, 65 to be exact.  Relishing in the myriad of possibilites of late summer harvests, yum, nothing quite like homegrown tomatoes.  It's hard work planting tomatoes digging deep holes in the wonderful gravel soil, vestiges of an old river bed, which is our soil medium.  It has definitely come a long way in the past few years.  Especially in the greenhouse, a nice confined place where straw mulch doesn't blow away and the work is finite.  An easy place to amend. amend, amend and not feel totally overwhelmed by the sometimes never ending tasks.

Those chard you see were planted out last Septmeber, started in mid-August, they made it through the winter despite a lot of neglect during the last weeks of my pregnancy and Aya's arrival.  Amazing, delicious and tender nonetheless...Its starting to bolt now, but was a great test as to winter growing in this unheated greenhouse.  I did cover it with doubled over remay.

Back to the soil...The best part of working soil and seeing its tilth, texture and color improve is absolutely the abundance of worms; slimy and slithering a true litmus to healthy soil.  This brings me to Wren, my 4 year old...One of her FAVORITE things is to find worms in the soil, long ones, fat ones, she perpetually searches for 'the big one'

Another one of Wren's FAVORITE things...Party dresses, that's right folks, earth worms and party dresses, definitely a girl after my own heart!

She pulls it off beautifully, party dress, winter boots and mud...Just one example of the amazing ensembles she comes up with, a super classy farmy gal...

Wren, like most kids, loves water, playing in it, making potions with it, swimming, and for sure one of the best things to engage her in on the farm is to help water the plants.

Yesterday, in the warm afternoon sun, she and some boys were jumping back and forth over the acequia, in her party dress, and at some point she just jumped right in, ahhh, summertime.  Can't help but to laugh, the unabashed, without boundries of social acceptance, that swimming in a party dress is fine, no problem. Thank goodness for children, such amazing teachers of what really doesn't matter AND what really does.

Speaking of weather, who would have thought after a day like yesterday that the night before would have been cold enough, even with greenhouse protection, to freeze the majority of those beautiful tomatoes I had been babying for the past three months and that we had spent all day getting into the ground! BUMMER! The life of the farmer, the ups and downs, the bumper crops and the failures.  Its one of the hardest things about farming and one of the most beautiful, the raw interaction with life.  The lessons over and over of how fragile and how resilient it can be.  And despite my huge disappointment, I must find some gratitude, for the fact that I still have beautiful, large, healthy tomatoes to replace the ones I planted, albeit without the prime choice of varieties, and that I can foresee huge successes within the other babies awaiting their ride out of the, heated, greenhouse and into the earth somewhere to thrive and to dance their dance of life.

And here's Aya, at the end of the day, not looking so grateful to be on my back any more...What a trooper she is!