The rain had been relentless! The crops are green and healthy (so are weeds), but they’re behind, significantly behind where we’d expect to see them at this time of the year, especially given how early we got a lot of the stuff in the ground. Here, it’s not really a business issue – for a csa the crop delay is tough, but we’re really a market garden. School just got out, summer people are just beginning to arrive, we can sell the stuff later.

It’s more of a morale issue. You can wait out the showers, make sure you’re wearing wellies, all that stuff, but when it rains every day and you’re a farmer, you’re just going to get wet. A lot. More often than not these days, I feel like Rita and I have a lot to commiserate about – wet, muddy, waiting.

Last week, the first pallet of custom milk bottles finally arrived on the farm. Getting them made was a long road for Allen – he asked an artist friend to design the label, and received a gorgeous, detailed pen and ink drawing. Good start. But then the bottle company insisted that the design had to be radically simplified, because their printers couldn’t render that much detail. And then the government’s raw milk regulators suggested that the standardized health labeling (raw milk is not pasteurized, stuff about microbes, etc.) should have a more prominent place on the label, and be printed in a larger font – basically, they had seemed to have no interest in or respect for the artistic integrity of the design. For a while, the whole thing was looking pretty thorny.

But then the bottles arrived, and they’re gorgeous. The green ink color, which Caitlin chose, sets off nicely against the creamy white of the milk. And although the design was greatly simplified, it retained much of it’s character. The one pitfall? The mermaid’s nipples. You can’t really tell in this picture, but they’re, um, a little target-like. There’s really no other way to put it.

Bunches of rainbow chard in the Tacoma, on the way to Saturday market in West Tisbury. We sold them all in an hour. The first couple of markets have been busier than I remember in previous Junes, and come noon we’ve been reloading the truck with a bunch of empty crates, and a cooler filled with other people’s produce – strawberries from Ralph and Ethel, bread from Julie, cucumbers from Rusty and Andrew ($1 each! In June!), and of course greens from Rebecca. Caitlin makes fun of me for buying them – we do, of course, grow our own greens. But I like hers, and there are worse things in the world to splurge on.