Lessons From The Garden

The garden is wild with last year’s seeds. Cornfield and California poppies, calendula, phacelia, red, white, and yellow clover, wall rocket, fennel, and hairy vetch claim the borders and pathways, grow in flowering thickets over the uncultivated edges of vegetable beds, riot in the corner where the old compost heap lay. Yellow spears of mullein shoot up through the old fishing net we hung as a deer fence.

Ours isn’t a huge garden—ten by ten meters, perhaps—but the wild edges make it feel deep and secret. Were I still today the fairy expert I was at five, I might know those edges differently, but the knowledge of magic is long lost to me. Instead, I admire practical things: the peas trellis heavy with vines, the tidy rows of leeks and lettuce, the bank of self-seeded calendula with flowers in every warm color, from safety vest orange to dusky pink and soft, butter yellow.

I read a book on sustainable agriculture last week that argued that the keys to success in farming were diversity and the elimination of waste, and I thought, these seem like good practices for any business, especially one so marginal as a bakery. Out in the garden in the gray light of dawn, picking my breakfast, my eyes kept sliding back to the poppies, impossible red against the muted colors of morning. Maybe there’s a bakery lesson in this, too, I thought. Maybe a business, too, can have an orderly, productive center, and deliberately uncultivated edges, were imagination and unexpected beauty can grow.

See you soon.

Sophie
​Owner | Baker

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TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White + Garden Herb
Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot
Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies
Oatmeal Marmalade Scone
Strawberry Buckwheat Scone
Rhubarb Strawberry Galette
Shortbread

WEDNESDAY MARKET
Red & White
Oat & Honey
Mountain Rye
Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies
Scone, Shortbread, Galette

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