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GROWING TRUST
Mid-June Twice a year, on opposite points around the calendar’s circle, the perpetual motion of our garden life goes quiet. One is obvious: midwinter, when fields lie under snow. Our animals need extra care then, but any notion of tomato is history. The other vegetal lull is in June, around Midsummer’s Day. Seeds are in the ground if they’re going to be. Corn and beans are up, cukes and tomatoes are blossoming. Broccoli and asparagus are harvested; peas are winding down. It isn’t that we walk out into the field on June 10 and say, “Wow, nothing to do anymore.” There will always be more weeds. Everything could be mulched better, fed more compost, protected better against groundhogs. A thriving field of vegetables is as needy as a child, and similarly, the custodian’s job isn’t done till the goods have matured and moved out. But you can briefly tiptoe away from the sleeping baby. It’s going to wake up wailing, but if you need the rest, you get while the getting is good. We had planned our escape for late June, the one time between May planting and September harvest when it seemed feasible to take a short vacation from our farm. If we’d been marketing to customers or retailers, this would still be a breakneck time of getting orders lined up and successive plantings laid out. Our farming friends all agree this is the most trying challenge of the job: lost mobility. It’s nearly impossible to leave fields and animals for just one day, let alone a week. Even raising food on our rela-
