Abundance is here

This has been a fun week because we're finally in harvest mode! In the spring we work and work and work-but there's not much food to harvest for dinner. But just in the last few days we've crossed that threshold where food is now abundant. A mixture of sunlight, water, and nutrients from the soil come together to form a great diversity of tasty vegetables. It's amazing to think it all comes from the same medium: soil. Soil plus a seed with it's own plan.

Also of note: the summer equinox happened this week! The long summer days are slowly getting shorter. This helps us out quite a bit on the farm because annual weeds like pigweed and lambsquarter will stop growing as fast. This is because they are genetically programmed to grow and produce seed only in optimal conditions. Now that the days are getting shorter, there is less time for them to reach their biological destiny and reproduce successfully. The seed that has not yet germinated might decide to wait another year until conditions are PERFECT to start growing. Seeds from these weeds can stay in the soil for 10-60 years. Which is where the saying, "A year of (weed) seed is 10 years of weeds. The fact that these seeds can stay viable for so long, coupled with the fact that one single lambsquarter weed can produce hundreds of thousands of seeds, make it imperative that we stay on top of weeding.

And that is why we've spent our week focused on weeding. Weeding, weeding, weeding, weeding, and more weeding. And more weeding. It seems like that is what we do all the time! Weeding by hand on our knees, weeding with a hoe standing up, or weeding with a tractor.