Just Your Average Girl

This Week's CSA Harvest:
Cabbage
Zucchini/Summer Squash/Patty Pan Squash
Kale
Basil
Dill
Potatoes
Cucumbers
Green Onions
Chard
Green Beans

I really like thinking about marketing and when campaign season rolls around, I'm always intrigued by how boring political campaigns are. There's no humility, no self-effacement. If I ever run for office, I'd be running the Just-Your-Average-Girl Campaign. It would go something like this:

I'm often late (as are all the Brenners, we suffer from what my friend Jones calls "time optimism")
I'm a B student
There are no Magna, Summas or Cumma behind my degree
I sometimes forget to brush my teeth
Not all my jokes are funny
I've bounced a few checks, forgetting to transfer funds into checking



When I presented this idea to my family, they assured me I would be hard pressed to find campaign funders.

Selling yourself, your stuff, your ideas....what a challenge. And then, you get stuck in a thankless job where only half the town likes you.

I much prefer growing flowers and vegetables, feeding people, making things a little more beautiful. But, even then, we're just your average farmers.



And, these average farmers are worried our potatoes and tomatoes are about to go down to Late Blight. This article from 2 weeks ago started the ball rolling in our direction. And now, we are squarely seeing signs in our fields. The best conditions for Late Blight are synonymous with weather that makes my hair curlier: humidity, misty rain, hazy sun and passing showers.
Though this summer weather is not so wet, this disease was apparently introduced by infected seed potatoes. Late Blight is a fungus that mostly affects leaves and most years we get it... in September. (Don't worry about eating the potatoes or tomatoes, what we can harvest in spite of the Blight, is safe for human consumption.)

The Just-Your-Average-Farmer campaign looks something like this:

Sometimes we get Late Blight
Sometimes we lose a crop to weeds
Sometimes we let something get root bound in the greenhouse
and....

It might just be the 12-14 hour days, every day, but we feel pretty average in July. A hearty harvest of cucumbers or larkspur can raise our spirits something fierce. But, it takes 12 months to correct a mistake in the field, it takes 12 months to try a new tactic. It takes 12 years to realize each year you'll be assaulted by some new bug, some old pest, some fresh disease. We brainstorm how we'll do it differently next year and then we have to wait to give our ideas a try. Long suffering patience, for this average girl-farmer.



But, don't despair. With 120 vegetable varieties and 200 flower varieties, there's always something that does well. It always a good season for something.

-Stacy