Just this morning, while trellising tomatoes and cucumbers
in the hoophouse, Jason found the very first ripe cucumber! It was so amazingly juicy and cucumber-y and
amazing as it is, cool on the inside.
Just barely. We have a tradition
around here that I hope gets almost downright silly in future years. Whenever someone finds the first ripe
something that is best eaten fresh, like a tomato or cucumber, everyone gets to
share a piece. That includes the first
cherry tomato… yeah, go ahead and imagine that.
Now imagine that with employees someday… are you laughing yet? Yeah, me too.
We always
love to watch how the littlest things excite people so much. Like discovering sugar snap peas. And just how amazing they taste. So many folks do a little happy dance for
peas! And when the first cherry tomatoes
start making it to market, folks get so excited and it’s contagious. They start smiling and they tell other folks
that so-and-so has whatever. Seasonality
is downright exciting!
There are a
few veggies that simply cannot be un-seasonal.
Snap peas are a great example. They come on sometime near the end of
June and after just a few short weeks they’re gone. And they simply don’t taste good when they’re
not fresh. Same thing with sweet
corn. Grocery store sweet corn that
started arriving a month or more ago is edible.
But it was stored so long that by the time it reaches dinner it’s just
starch really. Fresh corn from a local
farmer or at the market is here and gone but you never forget the juicy
sweetness that you get to experience.
When our corn comes on, we get to eat it for breakfast. We almost never boil it and only rarely do we
grill it; it’s that good. It’s also one
of those memories of my grandpa and extended family out in Michigan. Every couple days while staying with him,
we’d all go up the road a few miles and buy a bunch of sweet corn from a farmer
up the road and then sit on the porch and shuck it for dinner. Rarely was there any left.
I shouldn’t get myself started on tomatoes. Bred for shipping year-round, they don’t
taste like anything to me. I can’t even
call them cardboard. But fresh tomatoes
picked ripe or just about from varieties bred for their flavors are something I
could eat forever.
Perhaps it’s a good thing that Mother Earth made seasons. Each time the season for a food comes around again, it’s like discovering something new.
