Harvest and Heat

It's a cold, cloudy, rainy day and it happens to be our day off. I am trying to use the time to keep up some correspondence and just relax.

This past week of work has been long and involved. The temperature stayed in the 30s for most of the week and we had our first harvest for market. Thursday started at 6am and went to 8pm and was straight cherry-pickin'. I was fortunate to be on Quyen and lunch duty that day and I don't much mind hanging out with a two-year-old cutie and cooking curried chickpeas.

The long hot days are punctuated with dips in the spring-fed pond, just cool enough to revitalize the mind and body. It's the only thing that makes the heat bearable. Without it we would all wilt like neglected vegetables!

The Fraser Valley is hot and dry. Almost a desert, the arid landscape is red sandy mountains dotted with pines and covered with dry needles. It takes a lot of water to grow here. The farms are gravity fed by 3000m (I may have to fact check that) of PVC pipe from a mountain creek. We took a hike up there the other day, you can see some photos on my flickr at the side of the blog.

We spend all day turning on and off drip lines, cleaning filters and moving around sprinklers. More water means bigger vegetables but most plants have individual needs and it's not as straight-forward as turning it on forgetting about it.

Tomorrow morning we pull the rest of the garlic to start our week and before we know it, the sun will beating down on our backs again.