Sunday, June 17, 2007

Lettuce play


By mid-week (if not sooner), I look forward to spending time outside, leaving urban sights and sounds behind, washing away the residual electronic clean that accumulates after spending the week in front of a computer.

The farm is a short drive from where I live in Cambridge, just over the Belmont line. Close to civilization and yet hidden away, it's unexpected and kind of magical -- a place where something that sounds like a cell phone is actually a bird.

As I walked in from the road yesterday, I could smell dill, although it was several hundred feet away. Gretta was in the midst of orienting a couple of new volunteers, so she encouraged me to take a walk around the fields to bring myself uptodate. I was surprised to see lettuce -- not just heads of full-grown red and green leaf lettuce ready to be harvested, but also beds freshly planted with a new generation of seedlings.

This is good -- I haven't had my season's fill of the leafy stuff yet, so I was happy to learn that it's just the greenhouse that's too warm for lettuce, and not the fields outside. I may feel differently after eating my way through the seven heads of lettuce now in my refrigerator, but I doubt it.

No comments: