August is usually a bit of a lean month for us.  This year we're really feeling it, thanks to the excessive rain and flooding in June and July.  Many days it's difficult for me to go outside and see what there is - all I can see is what's Not.  If you really want to see what there should have been, vs. what there isn't, I'll let you do your sums here (scroll down to "Late Summer").   But for now, instead of focusing on what we don't and won't have this month, I'll try to give you a quick rundown of what we do have, and how much longer we expect to have it:

Tomatoes are definitely past their peak.  We still have some, and should continue to have some for at least the next month, just less.  It's been one incredibly challenging season for tomatoes; I've never had to work so hard for a tomato as I have this year.  We've been putting every spare moment we have into keeping the vines producing.  It's been paying off, but in slow pennies, not quick dollars.

Cucumbers: we're down to just the little sweet Diva cucumbers, and not a lot of them.  In good years or bad, it's typically just the cucumbers' time to go right now.  Same story for the squash.  The insects and disease pressure get so high by August, there's not a lot we can do to keep squash and cucumber plants producing, especially since we do not use insecticides or fungicides.  I think we can squeeze another week or two out of both, then that's it until next summer.

Our first planting of cantaloupes are done and sold.  We do have a second planting that should be ready soon, they're just not quite ripe yet.  We'll have lettuce for at least another week, maybe two, then we're going to have about a month-long gap.  We need to plant more summer lettuce roughly every 2-3 weeks to keep a continuous supply coming in, and that hasn't been possible until very recently.   Just one more crop on a long list of crops we couldn't get planted while we were underwater.  I think we managed to pull enough sweet onions before the worst of the rain to last at least a few more weeks.

If you like bell peppers and eggplant, August is your month!  Both came through our monsoon season relatively unscathed, and both hit their peak in August.  If you've never had a 'Rosa Bianca' eggplant, give one a try!  Rosa Bianca's are an heirloom variety from southern Italy.  Not only are they pretty as a picture, they're also sweeter than a globe eggplant, with a much firmer texture.  These are perfect cut into "steaks," marinated, and cooked on the grill for simple summer suppers. 

But if peppers and eggplant aren't your thing, please don't give up on us.  We put a ton of time and energy into trying to keep a continuous supply of a wide variety of produce.  Whenever the nature happens to throw us a curve-ball or three, we tend to see a big drop in our market sales.  Even when the produce starts flowing back in abundance, it's very difficult to get that momentum back.  We keep working our tails off on the farm every day, trying to keep it all coming in, scrambling to plug the holes in our harvest and planting schedules.  We grow year-round, 12 months a year, and harvest at least 50 weeks out of the year.  We've already made a good dent in our fall-crop planting. 

So it's not over.  It's just a blip.  Thank you all so much for your continued support through one of the more teeth-grinding, white-knuckled summers I've ever experienced...

As soon as the cool-season crops of spring fade away, I like to plant those areas of the farm out to summer cover crops.  Mainly cowpeas, which fix nitrogen in the soil, and sudangrass, which adds quite a bit of organic matter to the soil.  The cover-cropping never happened this summer thanks to the weather.  Still, we have grass growing everywhere.  Acres of crabgrass isn't exactly what I was going for, but grass is grass, right?  I've heard weeds referred to as the "poor man's cover crop."  They're weeds, which no one really wants, but weeds excel at mining for nutrients deep in the subsoil, bringing them up to the surface, and later making them available to your food crops.  Just don't let them go to seed!  We've been busy mowing, mowing, and mowing some more keeping it all down, while I've been contemplating the possible value of a herd of goats...

It's still not dry enough here to work the soil, but we've still been keeping comfortably busy through the hot, steamy afternoons seeding flats of fall and winter crops in the cool, air-conditioned house.  A joy to make some progress on something, anything, other than yanking grass out of the tomatoes, or mowing.  "Indoor farming" is awesome when it's a sauna out there!

Thanks to all of you who came out for the tomato events at the markets last week.  Hope you got to sample a little of everything!  We grow a wide variety of heirloom tomatoes - some mature early, some later, and so the specific varieties we have available changes a little from week to week.  If you come back for more, you might not necessarily find the same variety that you loved last week, but there's still plenty of wonderful summer fruits to enjoy, and new varieties to try!

I know.  I'm harping on the weather again.  Bear with me just one more time, and I promise I'll find another topic of conversation next week...

It started raining 42 days ago.  It hasn't let up since then.  We've seen over 30 inches of rain in that time frame.  For comparison, our area usually gets about 45 inches of rain in one year. 

It might just let up now.  This week looks to be dry, and I pray it stays that way for a while.  But nature felt the need for one last hurrah, and dumped another 5+ inches of rain on the farm Friday and into Saturday.   If you saw me looking white as a sheet early Saturday morning at the market, well, that's why.  For the record, I did manage to find my sense of humor again by mid-morning. 

Surveying the farm on Sunday, and looker closer at many of our crops today, that last 5 inches was the final straw for some.

I thought I'd take you all on a little virtual tour of the farm, after our biblical 40 days and 40 nights of rain. 

Rubber boots are required to even get out the back door...

Welcome to our farm.  I mean bayou.

Summer lettuce takes a lot of water, but not quite that much.  The shade cloth has hardly been necessary this year.  Note the umpteenth planting of drowned-out bean seedlings to the left. 

It's just a few beans, but we haven't been able to plant much of anything else either for the past seven weeks.  Keeping a steady supply of a variety of produce available every week requires having to plant almost every week.  We're going to continue to feel the effects of this all summer long.

We lost the potatoes first.  At least $3000 down the drain.  The onions went next.  We managed to salvage roughly 10% by curing them in the greenhouse, but there just wasn't enough room in there to process the entire crop before most of it rotted.  Another couple thousand dollars in lost crops. 

By the way, we're not the sort of farm that qualifies for any kind of crop insurance.

That's okra I planted before the deluge began.  It hasn't died, but it hasn't grown much either.  What's with all those weeds?  We don't use herbicides.  We can't cultivate when there's standing water over the entire farm.  Our only means of weeding lately has been to rip weeds out by hand.  The okra was liberated this afternoon, but we can't keep up with 3 acres of weeds with that method.

So many plants have drowned, wilted and died in the waterlogged soil.  It's a frustrating summer when you can't even get a jalapeno pepper to grow.

Some of our tomato plants look horrible.  Even the Sungolds, which we grow in the greenhouse, have suffered from too much water.  The water table is so high, I haven't had to irrigate in the greenhouse for about a month.  It's still too much water.

We had set out a second late crop of tomatoes in early June, about half of which washed away or drowned.  We still have tomatoes, and should continue to have some tomatoes.  Just not nearly as many.  I'm astonished that we got any this summer.  Estimated crop loss?  Close to $5000.

An environment better suited for ducks than chickens.

We do not have any creeks on this farm.  There should not be a creek here.

Water-logged cucumbers, peppers, and eggplant.  The regular garden cucumbers are done in.  I think the other cucumbers may hang in there for a bit longer.  Roughly 20% of the pepper and eggplant plants down at the lower end of this field (along the new creek) have drowned and wilted.

This wet weather hit at the worst possible time.  Our peak season is June and July.  We expect to earn close to 50% of our income for the year in just those two months.  I'd tally up our crop losses to date at well over $10K, and that number will continue to grow as the summer wears on. 

We need to start planting fall crops now.  And we desperately need an excellent fall crop this year.  Most of the fields set aside for fall crops look more like an unshaved golf course than a plantable farm field.

I find it much easier to sow fall crops directly into the ground, rather than spending a lot of time messing around with flats of seedlings.  That won't happen this summer.  We'll get those flats sown anyway, while praying that it dries out enough to work up the ground.  I've been telling myself it can't rain forever, but I've been telling myself that for what feels like forever.

Please don't tell me this is better than a drought.  Drought will make a farmer worry.  Excessive rain will ruin you.  I can always irrigate, but I can't pump water out of a swamp.  I've seen some bone dry summers.  I'll take a dry season over this mess, any time.

Hope you all enjoyed your one dry weekend this summer...personally I had almost forgotten what sunshine and blue skies look like!

Our tomatoes are definitely peaking this week.  We have red slicing tomatoes, sweet Sungold cherry tomatoes, a rainbow of roma tomatoes, and seven or eight different varieties of heirloom tomatoes.  Every spare box in the shed is tucked full with tomatoes, everyone around here constantly smells like tomatoes, and I think I'm starting to pick tomatoes in my dreams.  If it's going to rain just about every weekend, why not pick up a box or two of tomatoes and make a big batch of your favorite soup, sauce, or salsa?

The blackberries are starting to come in, and the poblano peppers are really cranking if you're looking for a pepper to spice up your salsa.  The green poblanos are fairly mild, while the fully ripe red poblanos pack a serious punch for you heat-lovers.  Getting down to the last of the carrots until fall - if anyone's interested in stocking up, carrot roots with the tops removed will keep for around two months in your refrigerator.  If you're wondering where the beans and zucchini have gotten to, after so many weeks of heavy rain and thunderstorms on a near-daily basis, some of our plants have taken quite a beating, and planting more in soupy soil is near impossible.  I've poured more bean seed out there than I care to think about, only to watch one row of seedlings after another drown in standing water.  The zucchini is in pretty much the same boat (pun intended), though they may recover with a little TLC.  I've constantly been overhearing, "you farmers must be loving all the rain this season!"  Not so much.  We still have quite a bit to offer at the moment, but keep your fingers crossed for us for more sunshine than rain, please!