Another in-between week as far as harvests go here.  Our second round of tomatoes is played out.  Our third and final planting of tomatoes is almost there, but not quite.  We have some early leafy greens (lettuce, chard, tatsoi) right around the corner, but after checking them out this morning, it looks best to give them one more week to put a little more growth on.  Then there's bok choy, beans, radishes, and more that are, again, almost there, but not quite.  Bon appetit to the peppers and eggplant again!

In all honesty, another "in-between" week with light harvests is a-OK with me.  August may not be our most productive month of the year, but it surely doesn't mean we're hanging around the house doing nothing.  Spring and summer crops go in a few rows at a time, every few weeks.  Fall and winter crops get planted out in huge blocks all at once, which is a daunting project if we're still up to our ears in 12-hour-long summer harvest days.  Most of our fall crops are planted out.  Most need a thorough weeding.  Almost all of the winter crops need to go in the ground in the next week or two, which means more soil preparation, planting, seeding, irrigating, followed by the inevitable marathon weeding party.  Sweet potatoes need to be dug, boxed, and cured.  Spent summer fields need to be mowed, tilled, and readied for cover crops.  The berry canes still need to be cleaned up and pruned back to ensure a good harvest for next summer.  Then there's the endless mowing, mowing, and more mowing of a wet summer, lest the grasshoppers move in and destroy it all.  All of this happens through the hot, humid dog days of summer.  The mere concept of Labor Day tends to be meaningless on a produce farm - but I sure do hope you enjoy yours!

If you frequent the farmers markets that we attend, you no doubt have noticed that our displays have been rapidly shrinking the past few weeks, and we're not exactly knocking anyone's socks off with either an abundance or variety of produce.  Most other local farms are experiencing the same.  With endless rain and drastically lower than normal temperatures, I'm starting to think of this as the Summer That Never Was.  I've seen more than a few highly experienced farms call it quits and shut down, at least until early fall; I see news articles on an almost daily basis discussing the impacts of this record wet summer on agriculture across the state.  We're going to hang in there, because I do believe our crops are finally starting to turn around, and because we're just stubborn that way.  The recent rains and cooler weather have been fantastic for the fall seedlings, but not exactly fabulous tomato-ripening weather.  It IS still only the middle of August, though, and no doubt we'll see some warmer sunnier days before it turns cooler for good.

I picked more cherry tomatoes this morning than we've seen in some time - still not stacks of flats of Sungolds, but a move in the right direction at last.  The larger tomatoes are re-blooming prolifically and the vines are loading up again with green fruit.  The sweet peppers have gone through a lull these past few weeks, but there are definitely a whole lot more big, beautiful green peppers on the plants, which means a whole lot more big, beautiful sweet peppers shortly.  And tender, first-cut baby arugula this week!  BLT's are awesome, but we love BAT (bacon, arugula, & tomato) sandwiches even more - if you've never tried one, you're missing out!  Green beans, lettuce, tatsoi, radishes, and sweet potatoes coming soon!

In other news, Zely + Ritz closed their doors after nine years of business last week.  We'll miss them!  Chef Sarig was an avid supporter of many small local farms, and tirelessly promoted our little operation through his restaurant.  CSA members who used to pick up at Zely can now pick up at the Pullen Place Cafe, in Raleigh's beautiful Pullen Park, just a mile and a half away.  Please note that pick-up hours are slightly different here, from 3-7pm.  Many thanks to Holly and her staff for working with us to arrange for a new pick-up location of such short notice!

We've been busy planting a slew of fall crops the past week or so - from broccoli and brussel sprouts to carrots and beets, salad greens and celery, and much more!  We're very grateful for the dry spell that has allowed us to get the ground worked up for those big blocks of cool-season crops.  Turned the irrigation on for the first time in months last week - hey!  it still works!  I was thrilled to get out there with a hoe this afternoon (can't hoe mud, it's been hanging useless in the shed since early June).  By early September we should be able to start harvesting some of the quickest-growing veggies like arugula, tatsoi, and radishes.

We also finally broke down and bought a flame weeder last week.  No herbicides are used on our farm, which means weeds have to be dispatched with a lot of manual labor: tillers, wheel hoes, and hand-held hoes are how we typically go about it.  But all three of those methods require dry soil conditions.  After spending the past two months crawling through mud ripping crabgrass out of everything by hand, I was more than ready for a new solution.  At any price.  A flame weeder is simply a propane-fueled torch that sizzles the weeds to death, and it works whether it's wet or dry.  We'll be firing it up for a test run tomorrow.  Fire makes me anxious, but hand-weeding makes me cranky.  Knock on wood that we don't set the farm on fire!

Another light harvest overall this week.  We've literally had to bring our tomatoes back from the brink of death after such a wet season.  This week may be one of the lightest weeks of the summer for tomatoes, but after much TLC, a generous amount of stubborn bull-headed-ness, and more hand-wringing than I'm going to admit, the plants are once again looking healthy, blooming prolifically, and setting new fruit.  I'm hopeful that we'll get a 'second summer' off of the vines in a few more weeks' time.  A few more cantaloupes now, and we're getting down to the last of the onions.  We've been cutting the summer lettuce hard the past few weeks, so we're going to let it rest and re-grow this week.  It'll be back on the menu next week.  Hopefully we should then be able to close the gap between the current planting of salad greens and the next round.  Plenty of peppers, eggplant, and basil right now - get out those ratatouille, eggplant parm, and pesto recipes!