Well, it's Week 9...

last year, there were only 8 weeks of the CSA - this year, we wanted to pull it through nine weeks,,,and we will. But it will be interesting. Sure, everybody gets watermelons for the second week (yea!) Outside of that - yes, there are tomatoes and of COURSE hot peppers...some eggplants, some cucumbers, some field peas...figs, okra...flowers for all. The herb beds are a crazy mess, but that's always the case late in the game. You just have to go through and find what's there. Oh, it looks fairly organized up front in the herb beds, but I've been drying herbs for the past few days and they're flowering like crazy, so getting to the good stuff takes a little doing. Will has promised to take the weedeater to the top of the basil...this may force it to give us another go-round for the late summer. By Monday of next week, Will is going to be out there cutting most things down and doing some plowing...getting ready to cover crop most of the garden for the fall. Like the insane people that we are, we've already been talking about what we're going to plant for the fall. The greenhouses give us all kinds of opportunities - few of which were realized this sumer, as they were slow in coming together in the spring. But now that they're up and functioning, we can plan for greens and early strawberries...and I'm trying to convince Will that artichokes would be so cool..they need to be over-wintered. It seems to get harder and harder to get excited about going out in the garden in the early morning and working until the sweat is just dripping into the dirt before you give it up and come inside..that's my m.o. anyway - the only time I feel eager to work. This morning I was out working a long fencerow of perrennial herbs. I didn't plant any of that in the garden this time, not even in the herb beds...I didn't want it sacrificed to the tiller. So if I keep at it, I'll have permanent stores of bergamot and ox-eyed daisies and hyssop. I don't know aout the feverfew. It dos NOT like the heat. We'll just have to see. In the meantime, it's only Tuesday, and this weekend we'll see all of our CSA members one last time. Sad in a way, but it's been such a good season...it's tempting to think about doing it all over again in the fall...but in order to do that, we'd need about ten hours of sleep a night for the next month!