A small part of the farm from above…beds of greens and fall/ winter brassicas in the North Blocks, one of the first photos from Noah’s new camera drone.
Dear Farm Friends,
What keeps a small farmer up on a Friday night in August? So many things, but at the moment, the burning question of how many melons we should bring to market, and how in the world we’ll find space for them in our trailer and booth space. Many thanks to all of you who came out the farm this week and picked up some summer sweetness. If you enjoyed those melons, we are still surfing that sticky-sweet wave, with canteloupe, lots more of the big “Lily” variety of crenshaw melons ripe as well as a huge pile of watermelons, so come on out to market Saturday morning (we’ll figure out where to put them, somehow), and keep on coming to the farmstore all week. We briefly debated bringing melons only, because we could fill all the market trailer shelves with just those fruits, but don't worry we won't leave behind the salad mixes, arugula, head lettuce, boc choi, kale, chard, collards, cabbage, beets, carrots, onions, radishes, salad turnips, potatoes, TOMATOES, sweet peppers, hot peppers, basil, cucumbers, zucchini….and, well, you get the idea. It’s August. It’s peak season, there’s so much for you to eat.
August is a funny time for small farmers. We planned all this: this bounty, this overwhelm, this avalanche of food. This was the point, after all, of all the spring work, all the summer weeding, all the pushes to keep plantings and plant care on the timeline. And yet each year the fruition of all that work can be a shock—the sheer weight, volume, urgency of all these late-summer harvests. We push ourselves, we push the team, sweat running down all of us in multiple days over 100, nights that stay warm and then suddenly drop, a reminder it’s actually less than a week till our average first-frost date.
If the farming year is a river, there are all manner of seasonal rapids. It’s a wild ride no matter what and only some of it is in our control. But just like whitewater, even if we pick the best line, if we have a solid plan, even if we brace and pivot just so and we make it through the rapids of June and July, August is that point when we lose it, the boat tips and there we are pummeled in a recirculating hole, all senses overwhelmed by the roar and the wet and the white. Of course the day we dropped the dog off for surgery is also the day that we had to take an hour of time from everyone on the whole team to try to herd a half-grown deer out of the fence without it injuring itself, when we we already behind on the harvest list…it’s August. Of course the sweet pepper volume doubled from last week to this, and it will likely double again for next week. There’s a lot.
One of our farming mentors likes to send out a reminder that August is a hard part of the season—that you are tired, the crew is tired, the plants are strained by heat, the pests and weeds are exploding, and your friends and family are talking about their vacations and you wonder, as a farmer, if this is really the life you want? He advises, though, that August is not the time to put everything in perspective—it’s the time to get through one day and plan the next, to put one foot in front of the other and stay the course. This year I read that advice in that first week of August, when I was feeling us slip into that whitewater hole, and it sounded a lot like the advice for getting out of that river hazard: against every instinct to fight your way up and out, sometimes the best strategy is to ball up and try to sink down, to the current at the bottom that will flush you out and downstream to safety. Don’t fight against it—don’t throw out the farming dreams in August…. Sink into the current instead of trying to fight your way out. Dive a little bit deeper down into that farming river, and trust that you’ll find air again somewhere downstream.
Bird’s-eye view of the wild, going-to-seed early summer flower planting in mini-block one. In true August fashion a steep learning curve and little time for all the tutorials meant a damaging crash and new tool on hiatus for repairs after barely getting warmed up, but there will be more.