Today, after shaking off the remnant fog from the previous night's events, I made the ~2hr drive to our vegetable and fruit share providing farm so I could a) see where all of our food comes from, and b) take advantage of the large quantities you are allowed to take, provided you do the picking.

It didn't turn out to be the best day in the world, as the rains came in and tried to wash me away. I persisted, hiding intermittently in the greenhouse with our future tomatoes between pea-hunting expeditions. All told I spent about 5 hours picking mostly peas and strawberries, but I made out like a bandit, carrying home with me 10 quarts of strawberries and 8 pints of assorted peas. The peas were a little bit tricky- labeled as snap peas, snow peas, and shell peas, but these labels seemed to be more of a suggestion than any sort of rule. In reality, the varieties were all intermixed, and I don't really know what's what. I spent a good bit of time tasting the varieties to try and determine which was which, and any one pint probably has all 3 varieties in it. I'll sort them later, and we'll consider posting pictures so people can vote for what the different varieties are.

In addition to the peas and strawberries, I also made off with about a packed sandwich bag each of cilantro, dill, basil, and parsley. I'm currently storing them in our refrigerator in a Reynolds vacuum sealed bag hoping they'll keep longer that way.

And finally, the icing on the cake, I talked one of the workers into selling me 5 green tomatoes at half price (they were actually ones that had fallen from their vines, so this was a good deal for him too). There will be fried green tomatoes in our future.

I also met this very friendly goat:
and was chased away from these eggs by momma bird:

For dinner tonight I made myself some spaghetti, using the ground beef from our meat share, and spiked in some fresh basil. Then I had a red leaf lettuce salad spiked with fresh cilantro. The fresh herbs are a very nice touch. And I'll bet you can't guess what I had for dessert-- strawberries!

(Please advise on what to do with all these strawberries! I need to decide fast-- slice and freeze? can? make a strawberry shortcake?...)