Circle M Farm

The first firefly of the season winked at me out of the back pasture tonight. Does that mean summer has come already? That an end is near to the crazy pell-mell busyness of spring? I certainly hope so, though I do wish to harvest my many plots of peas before the heat comes on.

Every year, I forget that spring is really very nearly a season out of control. All the stops are pulled with every living thing sprouting and birthing and starting and growing and stretching at once. It’s exhilarating and absolutely exhausting. So much needs timely attention, and opportunities simply won’t stop abounding.

Here at Circle M, the gardens are, thank goodness, now planted nearly fence to fence with a little room waiting for winter squash, melons, eggplant and peppers. All that’s really left to do is weed. And weed. And weed and weed. I used to think organic farming was, in fact, an easier way to grow food than employing chemicals. Who wants to mess with all those numbers and formulas and ratios and scary complicated sprays and dusts anyway? But since I’ve been gardening in soil quite a bit more fertile than my old Chicago backyard, I can appreciate the certain charm of eradicating a full year’s worth of plant and insect pests with a single application of toxic petrochemicals. I confess that I’m jealous when I compare conventionally-farmed neighboring fields, all tidy green rows bisected by bare black dirt, with my over-exuberant weed/crop mix which requires constant vigilance in the form of a small flat hoe. But hoeing is really one of my favorite tasks, one that actually produces in me a sort of zen-like meditative trance. If only I had more time for meditation!

Funny about the fireflies, though. When you are a child, the lightning bugs mean lazy summer evenings, no school and few responsibilities. Late nights, later mornings, sleepy hours at the pool or beach, fat chapter books and sticky popsicles. As an adult, you rarely experience any of those things, but still the sight of that first firefly awakens the remembered anticipation. Sort of like Snow Days. I’m positively glued to the radio the morning after a heavy snow, even though there’s no hope of a cancellation in my schedule.

The spring peepers in the slough have ceased their singing and given way to the oddly loud sprung-metal sound of bullfrogs calling. The air is growing humid and thick. While the nights are almost always cool here in our valley, some days are already quite brutal to work in, though we’ve still got two weeks until Summer Solstice. Right about then we start getting out of bed when the roosters wake us and get in the fields by 6 or 7. We get out early not because we’re superhuman Foxfire-type homesteaders, but because we’d rather do chores in the cool of the day, then come inside for a nap or office work during the hot afternoon. I very much like to go back out after dinner, work with the bats and then the fireflies and then finally rest, swinging in the hammock under the stars. It doesn’t happen enough.

Tonight heading to the back pasture to feed the bottle babies, I see no winking fireflies. But the moon has risen in a most fat, lazy and orangey-glowing manner. Is the Man in the Moon supposed to be smiling? He looks like he’s thinking of summer.