Tucked between your blankets tomorrow morning, you will hear the drip, drip, drip of the rain drops and the chill of the southwest wind through the open window and you will be tempted to linger in bed. If you choose to sleep, you will miss a very unusual market. When the bell rings at Hillsdale at 10:00 AM tomorrow, it will be summer, but the market closes in the autumn, which comes with the equinox at 1:22 PM. Who can resist the opportunity to shop at the last market of summer and the first of the autumn all in one day. Ages hence, you can tell the tale of time you started shopping in summer and didn't stop until autumn.

If you need a little more convincing, the Linda Colwell's lunch menu for the Organic Seed Production workshop should give you cause to shed those blankets and don your slicker and wellies. Linda structured the menu around the grains, pulses and vegetables grown from seed produced and improved on the farm. We started with a light posole using as stock the tomato nectar from canning tomatoes earlier in the week and the vary last handful of Amish Butter corn for the hominy. Next we had flint corn mush with roasted Astianas and borlotti. That was followed by a salad made from Peace, No War purple hominy, purple tomatillos, coriander greens, and grey shallots dressed with lime and olive oil. We ended with fresh shelled Tarbais with roasted onions and fenugreek. Popcorn, roasted pumpkin seeds and grapes provided the snacks.

Most of the ingredients in Linda's lunch will be available tomorrow, alas no pumpkin seeds or popcorn, but they will appear again at the winter markets. We will have a lot of the Astianas and boxes for bulk purchases; it was another excellent week for the tomatoes. We will bring Roy's Calais Flint and the last of Peace, No War kernels for making hominy, along with slack lime. We will also have soft red wheat kernels for grain salads as well. Freshly stone ground cornmeal and chick peas, of course.

We will also have some freshly shelled demi-sec Borlotto Lamon and Tarbais beans. These must be stored in the refrigerator and are perishable. This is the only week we will have them, another reason to shed those blankets. We have been working to adapting these beans to our region for over a decade and it is time for us to give them names that reflect our efforts. From now on, it will be Borlotto Gaston, a nod to its Italian cultivators but also crediting its new home. The Tabais is also due for a name change as we are a long way away from the fields of Tarbes in southern France. They will be labeled Tarbesque, recognizing that they are in the manner of the famous beans from Tarbes, but grown here at Ayers Creek.

Finally, we will bring grapes, beets, onions, garlics, shallots and preserves.

We will see you all tomorrow, either in the summer or the autumn.

Carol & Anthony Boutard
Ayers Creek Farm