mushrooms, etc.

Wow, I just finished eating the most heavenly dish: shiitake mushrooms, (my own shiitake mushrooms!), sautéed in butter, with garlic and a little salt. I didn’t even share it with anyone, which I do feel a little guilty about, but I did enjoy it so much… Well, the good news is that there are plenty more mushrooms where these babies came from. I am so excited! My mushroom logs are fruiting like crazy after the last heavy rains we had a week or so again. I love mushrooms, I love how they taste, and I love thinking of how amazing they are, with their mycelium like a vast network connecting everything in the forest.

Yesterday I was at the co-op and I noticed that a pound of shiitakes sells for almost $15. And I must add that my shiitakes kick butt to those, because they’re fresh from my backyard and not transported all the way from Pensylvania. All right, enough bragging. I just get over the top with these things.

Other good news is that our old field is planted to almost full capacity, and things are coming up and looking good. The greenhouse is also looking good, but I need to be transplanting stuff in the ground, especially the scallions and onions because they’re starting to get too big for the soil blocks.

Unfortunately, yesterday Ed hid a rock when he was plowing our soon-to-be berry patch and the engine stopped and there’s a big hole in the bottom of our BCS tractor now. It is not good timing at all for this to be happening. We need the tiller for our new field and for the berry patch, and we had lots of work planned for this week and next. Now we’ll have to wait to have it fixed, which should be about 2 weeks. I was stressed about it yesterday, because stuff needs to go in the ground, but then I realized that we may be ok just prepping a few beds by hand for the stuff that really needs to go in in the next two weeks. Anita said that we should get used to these setbacks and it was good to hear that coming from someone as experienced as she is.

Our CSA is doing very well; we’re getting close to being full. We only want to take on 25 members this year, given that we also plan to do 2 or possibly 3 markets. Ed and I will have to work non-stop to keep this all going, which is pretty much what we’ve been doing already. We work so much now that Sena started complaining that we don’t have enough family time. We’re trying to figure out a way to have one day where it’s just the 4 of us and we’re not doing work in the house, or on the house or in the fields. But I don’t know if that’s realistic for this year. In any case, I do feel like we’re together all the time, but she is right that we’ve been spending less time just hanging out and relaxing lately.

Sometimes all this work feels hard; but I’ve been thinking to myself, what else would I rather be doing? And the answer is really clear, at least for now, that there’s nothing else I want and nowhere else I want to be (well, OK, i guess i wouldn't mind sitting at the cafe and sipping coffee with a good book once in a while, but you can only do that for so long...).

peace