Many days I finish at the farm and I simply can’t imagine spending the time and effort that it takes to write an entry. All I want is to enjoy a glass of wine, a home cooked meal, a chapter of Harry Potter, and my indecently comfortable pillow-top mattress. The time that I feel the most inspired to write is in the middle of the day (for me this is about 10:00am as the heat of the summer is causing us to start at 6:00am most days now). This is undoubtedly inconvenient as the middle of my day is usually spent in the middle of an outlet and computer free field of veggies.

Today, however, I am determined to pull myself out of my linguistic ennui and give you, my readers, a taste of my day.

It occurs to me that the vast majority of my blog posts since I moved to the farm have been perky beyond all sense. The baby goats are frolicking, the cabbage is heading, the beans are flowering, the corn is tasseling. These things are all true and at the end of the day we tend to remember the good rather than the bad, but the truth is, sometimes things on the farm go bad.

Let’s start with something that’s beyond our control: the weather. It’s been a wonderful, cool, wet spring. Weeds have been a problem due to the almost nightly rain showers, but bugs haven’t. Until last week that is. Suddenly the rain stopped and the heat started. We adjusted our hours of operation, installed fans and upper our water rations, but nothing we humans did to beat the heat was able to help the lettuce. 1000 heads of romaine and butter lettuce decided that their lives were drawing to a close and that this was their final chance to pass on their genes. They all shot up three and four feet tall and started to flower and in the process became tough and bitter and utterly inedible.

While the weather is beyond our control there are other things that are not such as listening to the weather report and planning ahead. If we had thought a bit beforehand we might have cut all the lettuce before the heat started and been able to save it in the cooler for a few days to put into CSA boxes or sell at markets. But alas, instead it has become fertilizer for some new, heat resistant crop.

The same weather that caused our lettuce to grow big and beautiful and to then hit puberty at lightning speed is also somewhat responsible for our weed problem. Although, to be fair, we’re more than a little responsible ourselves. As Richard says, “I know how to farm better than I do.” In an organic garden without the help of herbicides weeds can quickly grow out of control and the best method for subduing them is to kill them before they take hold. Till the plot once to kill the current weeds and then again to kill the seedlings before they have a chance to breed. But pressed for time many of the Coon Rock garden plots were only tilled once and the weeds are now threatening to crowd out the crops we were in such a hurry to plant. Now we’re in a race against the weeds to harvest our crops before the weeds can go to seed and infest every corner of our 5 acre garden. Score? Coon Rock:0 Weeds: 1,000,000.

And finally the carrots after which this post is named. It’s hard to figure out what to blame in their case. I think it’s more like a learning curve than a failure. As you saw in a previous post, our carrots were started in compost and then transplanted into the garden which is compost infused local soil. The problem is that the local soil here in NC is naturally clay-filled. Carrots apparently prefer softer soil and these carrots quickly gave up in our dense, orange dirt. As you can see the carrots manage for about two inches and then begin to grow in spirals to compensate for their lack of ability to dig in deeper. Jamie has compared their appearance to many anatomical features, none of which I like to think about while eating.

No matter what small or large tragedies you have to face in your own garden you’ll still have to eat. With that in mind here are some late spring/early summer menu suggestions:

• Start your day with Zucchini Fritters and sour cream. A great way to use up the zucchini that many of us are already getting overwhelmed with (Unless, in another stroke of bad luck, your zucchini plant have been killed by blight)
• Lunch can be a quick-to-prepare affair with Grilled Cheese and Zucchini Sandwiches or a wonderfully light plate of Cucumbers with Yogurt Sauce.
• Dinner can take advantage of the plentiful broccoli in Spicy Broccoli Garlic Pasta and your mutant carrots may be cut into normal-looking pieces and tossed with the last snow peas of the season in Buttered Peas and Carrots.
• With strawberries and rhubarb a wistful memory it’s time to look towards herbs to provide dessert until the next batch of berries comes into season. Personally I think there’s nothing better at the end of a hot day than a scoop of homemade Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream.