When summer sets in on our farm everyone breathes a huge sigh of relief.  Spring has been a time of furious planting, watching the weather for rains and late freezes.  But when summer comes, which is never truly here until June, (and of course we all know it can snow in Colorado any time), the true time of enjoyment comes with the long warm days, and the literal fruits of our labor.

What is truly amazing about summer on a farm like ours is how the minute plants grow overnight into big productive plants, with flowers bursting and the promise of ripe fruit to harvest.  This is especially noticeable around the time of solstice, the longest day of the year and true beginning of summer.  Once the days begin to get shorter plants change how they are growing.  Almost overnight they go from little seedlings to plants full with fruits in the form of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash, and so many beautiful flowers and seed heads. 

As the summer goes along it is the tiny fruits that grow from an imperceptible speck of into two pound heirloom tomatoes that never ceases to amaze me.  It happens so fast that I am sometimes stopped in my tracks at the surprise of how there is fruit where there once was only a seed.  We continue to seed all summer, such as our haricot vert and shell beans, so we relive this experience again and again. 

Harvesting our many different types of flowers we grow every week I am amazed how some of them keep pushing new flowers to be enjoyed all summer.  Some like our sunflowers grow so rapidly to make one huge beautiful bloom.  In the matter of weeks it goes from a seedling that we looked down at to towering above my daughters head, and she is truly amazed at the rapid progress her little seedlings make in the blink of her eye. 

As the days continue to get shorter, which a farmer begins to notice on June 22^nd, the entire garden changes course and the almost imperceptible forces of fall begin pulling the fruit forth in rapid succession.  The days of spring are recalled when time sped up due to the lengthening days, where all was a flurry of activity to get all the seedlings going, culminates in the deep breath of summer solstice.  Making it to that point in the year takes an incredible amount of energy, which makes harvesting the fruits and flowers in the field so rewarding.

And as fall can be felt coming in the shortening days of August the farm too slows down, just a bit.  We begin to plant greens again for a fall harvest just as we had been in spring.  It is these cycles of plants and planting, seed to seed, that keep us connected to the cycles of the seasons in a deep and rooted way, one that holidays like the ones marking ‘the beginning’ and ‘the end’ of summer cannot.