Peak Sun

These summer days that hover around the Solstice are no joke. The sun doesn’t so much set, as it rolls along the northern horizon, hits a skate ramp, and throws itself back into the sky to reheat everything anew. The days will shorten now, but honestly, I never notice it until that one day when it’s dark at 6pm. The days will always seem 16 hours long until they are suddenly 10.

I’ll take the long days, even if one can never keep up with the supercharged demands the sun makes, both on people and on the tasks needed to complete. As farming is so much about controlling what can’t hardly be (and doesn’t want to be) controlled, the sun also supercharges those aspects. Everything happens fast when the sun is high. Plants (booth crops and weeds) grow fast, a storm rolls in fast for a fast rain, then hot, fast winds come in and everything dries up super fast. Then, we will try to move irrigation out and it feels oh so slow. We will never keep up, not at this pace. It’s better to just accept that.

The groove of the season, although apparent before, is now firmly entrenched with the crew. There are few surprises in the week. Plant, weed, harvest, market, repeat. We just seeded in the second to the last carrots and got some summer buckwheat cover crop in the ground. The later was only made possible because we got a nice little hit of rain the other day. There is now, for a short minute, enough moisture to get that cover crop started. It also gives us a shorter minute of repose and repost when it comes to irrigation. And though I am ever so grateful for that break, I don’t dare say anything. That little break will be over before one can even put the words together.

One unique task for this time of year: we harvested the garlic scapes. This gives us a little garlic preview with the fresh garlicky stalks, but also will inspire the plants themselves to put their last weeks of effort below the ground rather than above, for bigger actual garlic in a few weeks.

Shortly after the summer solstice, in about a month, we will hit peak farm. We will do our best to keep up with the suns demands until then.

Here’s to long summer days…while they last.