That’s right! Around here it is all cool misty mornings (the fear of frost still not quite past) and warm sunny days (with plenty of spring-rain-just-when-we’re-ready-to-transplant-all-that-kale) and nights full of frogsong; a riot of redbuds and wisteria and dogwood and viburnum in the woods and a greenhouse filling just as rapidly with tomato, parsley, basil, oregano, sage, kale, broccoli, leek, scallion, eggplant, sweet pepper, beet, and chard seedlings; new building projects; and one young rooster trying to make sense of it all.

We are all in spring scramble mode, trying to get everything in place before our new piglets arrive next week, before our new laying hens arrive later in the month, and especially before our market season begins this week and our CSA season begins in late May!

Coming soon: Soup! A cookbook giveaway! Our plans for 2012! Thanks for your patience.

We’re still mad for summer vegetables, but these tiny beet seedlings in the greenhouse also have us daydreaming about early fall.

Let’s get right to it, shall we?

It’s a Can-a-Rama! The folks at Canning Across America hope you’ll keep the momentum from National Can-It-Forward Day going all week long with home canning parties.

Simple Bites has a slew of great posts on food preserving. Canning 101: The Basics is a great place to start.

We’ve been on a lacto-fermentation kick here in the Frog Bottom kitchen – lately, with vegetables.  Famous lacto-fermented foods include yogurt, sourdough, sauerkraut, and kimchi.  Lacto-fermented vegetables use a simple brine of water and salt (and sometimes whey) – no vinegar – to encourage good bacteria to preserve the food.  We may write more about this at some point, so for now I’ll just say I love how fast and easy this is! A few minutes chopping, a few minutes stuffing a jar, and then just a few days of waiting for all that good bacteria to do its work.  No giant pots of boiling water, no hours at the stove – the salsa you see below took me about 20 minutes to prepare, and that was mainly because of all the chopping.  Cucumber pickles and okra pickles each took under 10 minutes.  Read a bit more, and find the salsa recipe we used, at Lacto-Fermentation: an Easier, Healthier, and More Sustainable Way to Preserve.

Check out this fun infographic on home gardening!

Tired of pesto and Caprese salads? Wait — not possible.  But, we think you should try these basil cookies anyway.

Here are five awesome tomato soup recipes.  Make ‘em now or freeze some of the incredible tomato bounty and try them when the first fall chill creeps in.

(Did you know freezing tomatoes can be as simple as waiting until they’re dead ripe and then throwing them whole into a Ziploc bag and stashing them in the freezer? A quick blanching/peeling/seeding will make them a bit easier to work with come thawing time, but if you’re feeling overwhelmed, seriously, just throw them into the freezer whole.)

From the pen and kitchen of the ever-reliable Mark Bittman: 101 Simple Salads for the Season.  More fantastic and fast summer fare!

Umm, how fun does Lucky Peach look? It’s a new food journal published by the McSweeney’s folks. Have a look here.

And finally, we loved this essay about processing peaches and the way the long slog through a bushel of seconds can be a kind of meditation.

More to come later in the week! We’ve heard from a number of you that you need some help with okra, and with the mad bounty of eggplant, so that’s where we’ll start.

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Weekend Links is a regular feature here on the farm blog: a weekly(ish) list of articles, recipes, and other resources that have been inspiring and amusing us of late. A tasty smorgasbord for brain and belly!

But it happens every year, and yesterday we started preparing. It was a long, hot, deeply satisfying afternoon: Ali and the crew filled thirty-two 300-foot rows with 2000 collard plants, 3000 kale plants, and 4000 broccoli plants.  As the sun dipped below the horizon we watered them well, to prepare them for today’s triple digits.  Tomorrow: 3000 cabbage plants.

We’ll do it all again in late August for generation two.

We’ll tend to them all with sweat and care, and we hope all these numbers translate into bountiful autumn CSA shares and market tables, with enough remaining for a possible winter CSA or winter market.

Ali often remarks that getting in a full planting is one of the most exciting things that happens on the farm. You start with long expanses of bare ground, a greenhouse full of seedlings, and a hefty dose of determination. You spend a whole bunch of hours moving back and forth, back and forth, planting, sweating, joking, planting, stopping for water, planting some more.  And then you slowly uncurl and stretch your back and shoulders and there it is in the setting sun: a field full of promise.

And now, the last week (or maybe two) in pictures!

We’re still in short sleeves around here, and the tomatoes are still on the vine.  In fact, click here to see a video of St. Stephen’s market manager Erin Wright sharing loads of recipe ideas for these last weeks of the tomato season, on Virginia This Morning!

But the mornings are cool and the days are shorter and shorter, and we’re doing lots to gear up for the changing seasons.  Here you can see part of our winter squash harvest, curing in the greenhouse.  And Shannon is headed over to grab some flats of lettuce and mei qing choi — which she and Claire are diligently transplanting into the ground for y’all this very second!