IN THE FLOWERS
This Week’s Flower Challenge: This week, try putting herbs in your bouquet! “You can do that!?” Yes, and they can really put a bouquet over the edge into the sublime — and then you can eat that sublimity. Check out the bouquet below which features chive flowers, purple and green basil foliage and flowers, delicate flowering cilantro, borage, and nasturtium.
A flower bouquet heavy on the herbs
IN THE HERBS
Oregano, Marjoram, Thyme, Chives & Garlic Chives, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Chamomile, Tulsi Basil, Purple & Green & Bi-color Shiso (aka Perilla), Mints, Italian Basil, Purple Basil, Thai Basil, Cilantro Flowers, Dill Flowers, Anise Hyssop, Sage, Tarragon, and Vietnamese Cilantro, Culinary Sage, Sorrel
Herb Challenge: This would be a wonderful week to make pesto! Our first basil succession is in flower but can still be put to delicious use in pesto, and the plants would really thank us for a good cutting back. Feel free to take a significant amount (it’s great frozen!).
A beautiful evening to get lost in the flowers
FARMER’S LOG
THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER: Reposted from early August, 2020
The sun beats down, the hills are bleached gold, and the wind blows hot… the dog days of summer are here.
The term “dog days”, for the late summer, traces back to the ancient Mediterranean, where people connected the night sky return of the brightest star, Canis Majoris (aka Sirius, aka “Orion’s Dog”), to the sultry days of late July-August when, as Virgil said, “the Dog-star cleaves the thirsty ground.” These ancient people associated the dog days with fever, bad luck, and heat.
Illustration by Kayta for Richard Vacha’s book The Heart of Tracking.
As Marin naturalist and tracker Richard Vacha brilliantly observes of our own Mediterranean climate in his book The Heart of Tracking, the dog days can be a raucous, frolicking time for wild canines as they feast on the fattened prey and tree fruit of summer and as canine pups leave the den and come into their own. (Perhaps this is the wild origin of the naming of the star?)
But, in Mediterranean climates like ours, the dog days are also a scarce time, a spent time. They are the beginning of a great dry down and a great dormancy.
“For an animal,” Vacha writes, the late-Summer-early-Fall “can be as tough to endure as an East Coast winter. Food is scarce, water is scarce, and green vegetation is crowded into riparian corridors, drawing the animals that depend on these resources closer together. The animals who prey upon them have shifted correspondingly. Territorial patterns are all in great flux as the expansive cycle of the summer season slowly winds down.”
On the farm, this shift into the dog days — their abundance and scarcity — has been clear.
Our harvests are more and more heavy with fruit: Cucumbers, squash, eggplant; the first poblanos and sweet peppers are on their way; we picked the first few field heirloom tomatoes this week; our first melons are swelling; the wild blackberries are laden. In the garden the first flowers and herbs are following the wild grasses, tapping out and throwing seed. Even our Jack-O-Lantern pumpkins are turning from green to orange.
In our staple field crops, if July was an outward explosion of verdant green growth, the dog days are the beginning of a hunkering down, a drawing nigh, a focused inward stare toward the serious work of setting fruit, forming bulbs and tubers, and setting seed. The corn is tassling. The jubilant winter squash flowers are beginning to wilt and metamorphosize — green and gold orbs now swell in the shade of sun battered leaves. The potato flowers are beginning to pop and with them the plants will now look to swelling their secret orbs in the black earth.
Field 4 in the Dog Days of summer 2020
And as the wildland plants dry out and are scorched to gold, her wild inhabitants turn more and more to the farm — an irrigated green oasis — for moisture and succulent meals. The wild turkeys and their fluffy younglings visit the fields every morning and evening, snipping off hydrating bits of lettuce and broccoli leaves. They annihilated a whole patch of Romaine in just one evening this week. Song birds are raiding the greenhouse now, right on schedule, eating juicy germinating beets and Fall chicories. Gophers take bites out of our drip irrigation lines nightly, seeking the cool water flowing within.
The sweet relief of the first Fall rains will come to us all sooner than we think. Until then, keep cool, move slow, and enjoy the fruitful abundance of the dog days of summer.
See you in the fields,
David & Kayta
“Fox in a Coyote Bush” illustration by Kayta from The Heart of Tracking by Richard Vacha from Mount Vision Press
See you in the fields,
David and Kayta
