Suddenly, it's the end of September and the end of summer

On Friday night I made leek and potato soup with leeks and potatoes from our garden, and I threw in some bacon from Bobby Parker, a local guy who processes his own pigs. He lives near Gassaway, and there are beautiful, huge Tiger lily bushes in front of his house. There are all sorts of metal farming implements beside the driveway leading up to his house. He makes the best fresh sausage I've ever had. When we had our chosen-family reunion this year, I made a vat of sausage gravy and fresh biscuits. There's no kind of fun like making a huge meal with a bunch of friends in the kitchen and feasting with a group of the most wonderful people in the world. All before 9 in the morning.

Briefly, my potato and leek soup recipe: brown bacon in the bottom of your large soup pot. Scoop out bacon, set aside, and lightly fry cubed potatoes (skin on) and white part of chopped leeks in hot bacon fat. Add stock to cover the potatoes and bring to a boil. Simmer until the potatoes are tender, about 10 minutes. Use a potato masher to mash the potatoes, add crumbled bacon, chopped green part of leeks, black pepper, hot paprika, and heavy whipping cream (or half and half or just milk). Bring back to gentle simmer, then turn off the heat and salt to taste.

We suspended the CSA the third week of August and just restarted it this past week. The heat this summer was crazy, and didn't get more than 1/4” of rain at a time for two months. The grass turned brown and crunched under our feet. We didn't equip the garden with irrigation, and we have entirely too much planted for hand watering, even with the hose to do any good. We did try. We planted turnips, carrots, kohlrabi, rutabagas, mustards, lettuce, cucumbers, squash, and beans the first two weeks of August, and we watered every evening only to watch the seedlings pop up and dry out during the passing of another scalding day. Eventually we gave up. Kevin held out longer than I did. At that point, I was kind of avoiding the garden. It looked so sad and droopy. I could almost hear the tomatoes pleading for water. I felt despondent.

I planted hundreds of seeds in flats and set up a makeshift plant baby raising station. We raised some fantastic looking bedding plants. Their vigorous growth kept our spirits up. And hand picking the barrage of leaf-munching caterpillars kept us occupied for long periods of time.

Finally, it rained for three days. It was the perfect rain; gentle and soaking. We got around 5” over those three days, and everything sprung back to life. The trees in the hills that had started to yellow turned green again, and all the blooming weeds towering over the cars on the roadsides and in fallow fields exploded into yellow, purple, white, pink, and red. We rushed out and planted hundreds and hundreds of bedding plants. Lettuce, broccoli, romanesco, mustards, cabbage, and arugula are all now growing like crazy in our beautiful dirt. I couldn't believe how crumbly, dark, and loose our soil has gotten since just this spring. We also replanted our beets, turnips, carrots, radishes, and kohlrabi. Everyone is poking their heads up. It's so nice to see them.

Our CSA has expanded from 4 shares to 13 since May. We have done no marketing. It's all thanks to the newspaper articles and word of mouth. I couldn't believe how understanding our customers were about taking a break. I have no idea how we found such wonderful people to be our customers. Everyone seemed really happy about their first fall share this week, and I felt really good about what we gave them. We're incorporating some produce from other producers right now. There are so many fantastic growers at the market, and they have some vegetables that we weren't able to produce this week. And buying from them using money we earned by selling our own produce helps create a feedback cycle that stimulates the demand for local produce, even if only a little bit. Several people told us how happy they were that we were back at the market yesterday. Customers asked about us while we were gone. A couple of the other growers even told us that they missed us. I almost cried. We couldn't have imagined a warmer community to become a part of.

We left the fallow part of our acre alone (read: I didn't bush hog). I remember sitting in the living room window last year at this time, before there was a window in the rough opening. Where our gray water mulch basin is now, there was a patch of perilla mint in bloom. As it's related to basil, its blooms are exactly like basil's, tall stalks of delicate little purple flowers. I remember almost being able to feel the hum of all the bees going completely crazy in the blooms. I saw my parents' honey bees, carpenter bees, other wild bees, and other pollinators, like different wasps and bugs I can't even identify. So now we have half an acre of perilla in bloom, and you literally can feel the buzzing in the air. I've stood on the edge of the field and seen hundreds of dragonflies dive bombing the tops of the weeds, with song birds flitting back and forth across the field, darting in and out of the trees that border the garden. There are countless bees, rolling around in almost obscene abandon, covering themselves in pollen. It's magical. I thought of sitting in my windowless office, reading in Countryside and in gardening books about leaving wild parts of your farm for the wildlife, a pocket of biodiversity. And now here I am, living in a place that's just exploding with life and diversity.

The mammoth sunflowers we planted this year did grow to be mammoth; they were probably 10' before their huge heads drooped. Now they're a convenient wild bird feeder, away from the barn cats and off the ground. It's a sight to see; the song birds flit from our natural privacy fence, the stretch of 7' tall weeds in bloom along the creek bank, to the drooping sunflower heads. They perch on the top and hang upside to grab a seed and fish out the kernel. The ground is littered with the empty hulls.

I've been taking every opportunity possible to go to the creek during the heat of the day. I just know that our warm days are almost gone for the year. Kevin heard from an old timer that the number of snows in the winter is the same as the number of fogs in August, and it was a foggy August! Some of the locals built a little dam from big rocks and a log, so there is a magnificent swimming hole at Redneck Riveria this year. It encompasses an area where water is gushing up out of the creek bed, at exactly the same temperature it is under the ground, which is cold. The warmer water coming from upstream, heated a little by running shallow over the sun-warmed rocks, mixes with the icy water coming up from the aquifer. You can stand where the warmer water comes spilling over the rocks next to the colder water and feel the two flows mixing together. I take my goggles down there and drift around, caught in the current like so much drift wood, watching the fish pecking at the rocks and the leaves rushing by. Paradise.

On a completely different note, I just finished reading Collapse, by Jared Diamond. I am totally and completely convinced that we are currently living in the beginning of the crumbling of our global society. County lines, country lines, party lines—we are all in this together. I can't stomach what I hear when I do turn on the news. The same paralyzing squabbling here, chaos and suffering out there. “There's coal in those mountains, and as I see it, God put it there for man to take it out.” And we'll all drink the poison that seeps into the murdered streams, that feed the sickened rivers that empty into the despairing ocean, to be lifted back into the sky, cycled through the clouds, and fall back to the ground. Towards the end of the book, Diamond wrote, “Thus, because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world's environmental problems will become resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice...”

I feel... so completely grateful to be where I am, doing what I'm doing. This is my pleasant way, of my own choice.