This week it was raining pretty hard as we collected our 4 quarts of strawberries. The children played out in the yard as Megin and I gathered our greens, herbs, turnips, and other goodies that had been harvested that morning by other CSA members.
We gave each soggy child their little blueish green quart containers and headed out to the strawberry patch. "Everyone is acting like there it's a perfect day. It is as if nothing is going on out there." commented farmer/CSA queen bee/flower gardener/and the organizational backbone of our CSA.
I thought a bit about why no one minded the rain. I think, that first of all the farmers have been out in the rain all day every day for the past week whereas us city dwellers who work in cubes, classrooms, boardrooms, and whatnot hop from car, to shop, to work, to home or something like that.
The second reason is that we're not willing to give up the strawberries. Not many members are willing to lose their strawberry harvest for a few, okay many, drops of rain. As I always said as teacher, when I would round up my kids and take them out after an indoor recess, "We don't melt in the rain."
This year Lindentree has at least six varieties of strawberries. They vary in size, taste and flavour. We experiment hopping from row to row looking for the reddest and the sweetest of the bunch. The berries start to sit lower and lower to the ground heavy with rain. I hope that we will get at least another week or so of strawberries, because they are such a treat!
