Wouldn’t it be nice if it all walked in the door that way – rinsed, bundled/packaged, and ready to put on the Market table?
If only.
Round One: the easy stuff. Tomatoes, ground cherries, cucumbers, beans, kohlrabi, and carrots. I found these nifty buckets at the dollar store, they’re fabulous for harvesting!
Round Two: the leafy greens (clockwise from top left: Swiss chard, kale, malabar spinach, and cabbage). Easy to harvest (if you can stand the bugs flying up in your face), not so easy to keep in the container.
After Picking: the carrots have been trimmed and gently washed. Don’t those yellow carrots (Jaune du Doubs, pronunciation, for the curious: ZHUNE d’ DOOb – soft ‘b’ at the end) look vibrant and yummy?
After all the gentle washing, trimming, removing bad pieces (damaged, diseased, etc.), and bundling for sale, you get the result in the featured image. Picking took until about 1pm – I space picking with work so that work doesn’t get too frustrating and I don’t get exposed to allergens for as long, so the actual total picking time was about 50 minutes. Preparing took the rest of the day, until about 5:30pm – again, spaced out with work, mostly, so only about 2 hours of actual work there.
After I finished picking, it started raining again. As has happened the last few times it’s rained, the sun peeked through under the clouds near the western horizon. And I finally figured out how to manipulate the settings on my phone camera to actually capture the colors!
First: The sun hadn’t been reaching under the clouds for very long yet. The colors were still fairly well blended together across the clouds.
Second: When I turned around, hello! There was a rainbow. More fiddling with the camera to try to capture the colors.
Third: Turning back around, the colors had gained depth and clouds had developed fiery edges as the sun sank lower.
Last: Not too much later, the light started to fade and the colors darkened.
On that note, I think it’s about bedtime. Gotta get up early to load the car tomorrow, since I didn’t do it this afternoon because of the rain.