Midsummer Madness

The month of July was exhausting, with yo-yoing temperatures and countless fires to put out. August looks promising in comparison. We have begun harvesting the season’s first melons – they are truly delicious – as well as those summer stalwarts: eggplants, peppers and the quintessential tomato, which weighs heavy on the vine in great abundance this year. While we had extended an invitation to our partners to come pick garlic with us, the July heat wave precipitated things and we had to harvest it quickly, the four bottom leaves having dried out more quickly than expected. In the CSA calendar, August signals the beginning of more intense harvesting as the farm schedule shifts from a balanced mix of seeding, weeding, monitoring, transplanting and harvesting, to a lop-sided one where the first four activities are greatly reduced relative to the last one. While planting continues, it is at a much diminished pace compared to earlier months. The farm’s life cycle shifts, and suddenly our thoughts turn to a to-do list of pre-end-of-season fieldwork, barn repairs, fence mending and countless other pressing things that had been postponed during the frenzy of early summer.