Carrots in the laundry basket

There is a certain pressure that descends upon the producer at this time of year when nature's growing magic is in its prime. As if it wasn't enough simply slogging ones guts out since the spring to produce mountains of fresh lovely stuff, the real challenge seems to lie in harvesting in time, trucking it all off somewhere and convincing customers to buy it. It's immensely disheartening wittering away a good 24 hours of finest floral design (ie. bunching of flowers in the barn) only to have it return to the farm post-market withering and accompanied by an even worser-for-wear farmer. Don't get me wrong, our flowers are adored, we are simply blessed with so blooming many of them.

We are now brave enough to venture at 4am to the city of Halifax as well as our local village market. (Well Jamie is anyway).The cool room needs to be about 4 times the size and despite selling a good majority of our flowers, by Monday it seems to be full once again. The gladioli are simply stunning, though due to no fault of our own, instead of planting 500 white stems we have produced 500 hot reds! Not quite what we were planning for the wedding season. Sunflowers are beaming their sunny faces everywhere and the dahlias continue to flounce around the garden. Sweet peas are the hot favourite amongst a certain crowd. Statice continues to be one of my personal favourites, closely followed by Nigella and Asters and think Jamie's is safflower but we are both overwhelmed by the celosia. What am I talking about? Just trying to impress with my floral vocabulary, the fact of the matter is, I really don't leave the farm thesedays.

As if we haven't taken on enough by growing an uncountable number of flowers, we also have heritage tomatoes, beans, courgettes, salad greens, garlic and now carrots to add to the fun of it all. I even discovered artichoke cunningly defying the weeds in our strawberry patch. Running out of places to put all our harvest every available receptacle from the barn to the kitchen is used. I appreciate that I am getting off rather lightly with carrots in my laundry basket.
Fortunately the hurricane went the other way and by some stroke of luck the crazy high winds didn't have any adverse affect on even our tallest of stems.

After having a rather full house with guests from Germany, Quebec and BC, it's just Jamie and myself at the farm now since all the volunteers have moved on to gain experience elsewhere. It's a quiet relief to have the place to ourselves again, good job we have a quarrelling pair of dogs to keep us company and nip us every now and then lest we were actually taking a moment to relax.