Connecting the Dots:

Summertime at GB Culinary's Peachtree Farmstead

notes from the field by kaylinn buchanan
@peachtreefarmstead

The season is in full swing at Peachtree Farmstead. We are getting a great amount of summer squash, and the beginning of some unique varieties of winter squash as well. Heirloom tomatoes are everywhere! We have been enjoying bush beans that taste great right off the vine. Lemon cucumbers are my favorite to make their debut this year and I will make sure they make a return every summer! We have more lettuce, greens and beets than we know what to do with. Shishito peppers and eggplant are prolific too.

This time of the year brings a particularly long sort of busy, with days outside that start early and don’t end until past dark (never without Colorado Aromatics’ NoSkeeto natural bug repellant).. If you were to fly over the farm on a given morning, it would probably look like little dots running back and forth from the garden to the kitchen, and back to the garden, their little dot dogs running around them.

I get to see the bounty of the farm right as it is harvested and brought to the kitchen. We retrieve the empty baskets and I know that what had been in it has turned into something delicious. But I am so quick to get back out and retrieve what the garden has next to offer that I rarely stop to think about what its new incarnation might look like. I watched at a recent farm dinner an excited group of guests seated at a long table in an idyllic farm setting served multiple courses of art on a plate. The seeds that had been cultivated months ago, fed, watered, pruned and harvested, were now components of a meal that was being enjoyed that very moment. When I think about it that way, each green bean or leaf of basil is important, and being part of a process that allows people to enjoy and be nourished is pretty cool thing. So that is what I will remember, to not just be the little dot that runs back and forth from garden to kitchen but a part of something cool that people get to enjoy.