Blink and you will miss the best parts, like these baby apples. There’s just so much to do…

June on a small working farm is a blur of soil (most of it in the form of dirt under your fingernails and dark stains on the knees of your jeans), seedlings (hundreds of root balls and spindly stems), hoses and more hoses, old hand tools that give you splinters, plastic covers and metal staples and wheelbarrows of mulch. And weeds. And ticks. Did I mention we have baby apples?

We are drowning in lettuce. Cutting, washing, packing, salad mix every day.

It’s pretty much lettuce as far as the eye can see. Except for those potato rows…

Roy’s been hilling his potatoes–they’re already a few feet tall and blossoms have started to appear. (So have the Colorado potato beetle, our favorite.) The neat rows look really cool.

The peas are doing that thing they do–climbing the trellises fearlessly.

We’ve planted a 100-foot row of zinnias. Benary’s Giants in all different colors. Can’t wait! Gladiolus and sunflowers, too.

And in the hoop house, the early tomatoes are absolutely thriving–lots of little green Sungolds showing up. 

And the hoop house basil finally settled in–some really cold nights left the plants feeling a bit queasy, but they’ve recovered, and with a nice boost of fish fertilizer, they’re greening up.

The first rounds of cucumbers (below) and summer squash (above) are in and they look happy. 

The hardest thing right now is getting the tomato rows prepped (a LOT of rocks that need to come out), covered, set up with irrigation hoses, etc. But we’re making progress, with 100 or so plants in…and many more to go.

And back up at the farm stand, all our purple flowers are in bloom and Roy’s little lupine and hosta corner is looking smart. Pretty little things to rest your eyes on if you remember to stop.

But about that lettuce…there are certainly worse things to have a lot of–I love this stuff.

Happy June from Green Island Farm.