August is kind of like a month of Wednesdays

August. August can be a bit of a slump month where morale is concerned - the weeds are tall, the diseases and pests are proliferating, the zucchinis have no respect for Sundays, and that first hard frost looks impossibly far away. This year, the effects of all the rain in May and June are still making themselves known - we've got gaps the production of lettuce and beans from the weeks when we couldn't get our equipment in the field to prepare beds to plant successions, onions swimming in weeds from the weeks we couldn't get in the field to weed, and cucumber plants giving up the ghost early because of diseases that came up on the storms. The great bounty and beauty of August can begin to feel like a burden when the cooler is already full and the tomato hornworms have just moved in.

The upside of August, of course, is the arrival of the deep summer fruits - tomatoes, eggplants, melons. Those, of course, have all been a bit late due to the cool and wet early on (see above), but they're starting to roll in. We had three whole cantaloupes at market on Saturday, and there are a lot on the plants, so we expect to have them in force soon.

(And soon, we'll make some time for an afternoon at the lake or a long bike ride or a little dinner party, and then we'll love farming again.) Fall will be upon us before we know it, and we'll be wishing for a few more weeks of August to get done everything we want to do.