The glowing full moon this month felt like a transitional milestone. I stood out there watching it in all of it’s luminous glory with a chorus of crickets contemplating the summer. The summer that is here today in fullness and bounty but will soon begin to wane with the moon itself. The children of the world are going back to school. Melon and sweet corn season have peaked and are ebbing along with the daylight. The dewy mornings, the cricket courses, the cool nights, the yellowjackets, the apples ripening and the goldenrod swaying in the wind are all signs of Fall for me.
Interestingly, summer is my least favorite season, but somehow I always feel a little sad when it ends. An air of melancholy lingers while life just simply goes on. Fall and Winter are my most restorative seasons. My body thrives in the cool weather and finally the farm resumes a more manageable level of responsibility. We begin to sleep better. Summer is busy, intense, chaotic and always slightly out of control. There is always more to do than what feels like can actually be done. Although just yesterday I think I heard Adam say three or four times accompanied with a big sigh “There’s SO much to do, I don’t know how we’re going to get it all done”. He is cursed with the ability to see everything that should be done at once and it’s an overwhelming task.
On a farm there are endless tasks. There are discretionary and non-discretionary tasks as well. In summer we operate nearly exclusively on non-discretionary tasks. The cucumbers, the sweet corn, the melons must be picked and there is no discretion to be made about it. The boxes must be packed. The trucks must go out.
The room for accomplishing non-discretionary tasks on a farm is harder to find. There is a mounting list of broken equipment. Maintenance to be done. Roads to grade. Trees to prune. Decks to power-wash and stain. Fencelines to repair. Rocks to pick. Yards to mow. A shop to build. A zert to grease. A gutter to clean. A leak to fix. Who will do it and when? How long will the discretionary tasks need to wait to be done before they’re no longer discretionary? A farm is blanketed in these tasks. They rejuvinate by the dozens each day.
Good farmers are excellent at prioritizing. With endless tasks to be done we must know how to find time. How to manage it all as the seasons change and the priorities change and the energy level for certain tasks rise and fall.
You may still remember all the rain we had this Spring. There was a disease or blight that was starting to grow on our tomato plants and so we pruned them back heavily this year. The heavy pruning set the plants back quite a bit. In previous years we were already giving 5lb bags of tomatoes every week at this time. We’re seeing lots of green tomatoes on the plants and expect production to pick up here in the next week or so. This year we will be giving tomatoes later into the year than in previous years.
Melon season is also coming to an end soon. This week we will be sharing cantaloupes and canary melons. Watermelon season is over now. The Canary melons have a bright yellow rind with a crispy, sweet, green flesh. The canary melons are a personal favorite that can be very sweet when fully ripe. Their flesh resembles the texture an color of a cucumber, but contains all the sweetness that a melon should contain. The smell of two macro bins of melons when you walk into the cooler feels like a kind of smell-therapy. A heavenly smell that triggers a flood of happy hormone release in the brain.
As the melon patch begins to looks spent, the winter squash field begins to look mature. There are bright orange and yellow fruits ready for harvest in there. The potato patch is beginning to die back. The Brussels sprouts look like an upcoming superstar and I can’t wait to dig up the first sweet potatoes to see how well they’ve done. From above ground they look full and healthy. Signs of Fall all around!
