Yellow Surrounds: Week #15, 9/16/20

Green dominates our fields right now… the pale green of Brussels Sprouts towers, the variegated shades of lettuces, the contrast of deep green tomato tops against their browning stalks.

I always think of September as the yellow month. Whenever my eyes look up from the brown and green of our fields, I see shades of lemon, blond, amber, and gold.

The neighboring conventional farm fields are awash in yellow…. the soybean crops made their urgent and quick change from green to gold and brown over the course of last week’s cold rainy weather.  Whole hillsides are yellow now.

Corn fields, ten feet high, are a tie-dye mix, a veritable waving sea of Packer leaves.

After a summer of providing sustenance for the monarch caterpillars, milkweed plants ring our fields with green leaves having gone as bright as lemons.

Goldrenrod flowers, like mini yellow fireworks, sparkle along the edges of county roads and light up patches of prairie.

The black walnuts, one of the first deciduous trees in our area to drop their leaves, hang heavy with their compound leaves of nine, edged with yellow.

Bright sunshine centers of purple asters catch my eye.

Wild sunflowers line the trail, their small heads tracking the movement of the day’s sun.

The amber of foxtail lines the roads.

And just like I notice my daughter’s gray blue eyes even more when she wears a blue shirt, the human additions to roadways stand out to me more this time of year as well.

The metal, triangular spray-painted signs that warn me of deer, or curvy roads, or trail crossings seem so bright, so…. yellow.

Double yellow lines centered on pavement.

And in a normal year, September also brings the first seasonal sightings of school buses.

Yellow surrounds.

Enjoy your veggies,
Farmer Cassie