Mandatory August deep breaths. Will you join me? Breathe in…… breathe out…… Breathe in…… Breathe— AhhHHH never mind! No time! No time! Strap on the oxygen machine and go go go! Let’s see some hustle! In preparation for .15 inches of theoretical rain, we got an early morning start to harvest 5,000 onions that could’ve rotted if wet, 225 ft. of cherry tomatoes that needed to be plucked for csa, and 500 feet of strawberries that don’t do well when damp (really, who does?). That’s almost enough for a normal Monday right there, but onward ho we go! We then employed gigantic silage tarps as rain jackets for beet and chard seed crops that are just ripe enough to be destroyed by rain, but not ready enough to harvest. It’s a hefty job, but the details are a bore, so on we go through our Pinnacle Day for Productivity. Nathaniel harvested lettuce and phacelia seed and threshed parsnip seed then headed off to another isolation plot with his bro to harvest plump umbels of mature carrot. Meanwhile Brian and I collected and processed millet, feverfew, scabiosa, and spinach seed to make room for new seed harvests to enter our seed drying caterpillar tunnel. Our kind sister-in-law and work-traders shop-vac’d and swept up soon to be ripe nasturtium seeds from plants we grew in landscape fabric for easy seed collecting. Brian sprayed coolers, lugs and pack shed tubs to get ready for Tuesday’s harvest and I shuffled irrigation lines around twice, knowing our predicted rain wouldn’t likely be enough for mature food crops. How right I was… Now 8pm, Nathaniel and I sit on our bed with the door closed to muffle the noise of kids pretending to be kittens, while writing you this little note. He checks the weather. The rain passed us by. Sigh… and breathe.
