By Jana McNally
I cried about blueberries a few days ago. I really don’t cry that much anymore and rarely about food, although I did once cry about lettuce. During the summer of 1997, my husband, Ivor, and I were experiencing our first year of farming on our own. Our previous vegetable farming experience had taken place in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Picture cool drizzly winters and sunny, dry summers where temperatures reached the 80’s during the day and 50’s at night and strangest of all to a girl raised in the Ohio Valley, no humidity. My husband, though raised in Louisville, spent every summer in New Hampshire working on a dairy farm from the time he was big enough to catch a hay bale. Some of his summers were even spent in Greece when his father was on sabbatical. But not until this particular hazy, hot and humid day in July did I realize that this man who was farming with me had never spent a full summer in Kentucky. Therefore, in an overworked, under-rested, seven month pregnant kind of way, I cried about his trying to grow lettuce in Kentucky in July.