I really don't know how this happened, but we're already in the last half of August. It's cooler (which the humans and the fall crops enjoy; the summer crops, not so much--notice a drop off in tomato production), we're planting a lot of cool season crops, and the farmily begins to spread its wings and fly off to other adventures. This part is particularly sad. We form amazing bonds with the young (and not as young) people that work here, even over just one season, and it's always bittersweet to watch them go off to lives outside of Tumbling Shoals Farm. Although a few of these folks were just here part time, we had the largest farmily ever to help us have the most productive season in the 15 year history of Tumbling Shoals Farm. The amount of food that came off from this tiny farm has been absolutely astounding this year.
Ironically, as we head into cooler weather, we're headed into a great salad mix crop. Kelsey and I just could not get the seeds to germinate during the hot weather and it has resulted in a gap in lettuce ready to plant. We seem to have solved the problem now, but we're still going to have a rather large gap in salad mix. The tomato harvest is going to also dip significantly for a week or so before we start harvesting the late planting in earnest. We were a bit late getting it into the ground (due to a rodent in the greenhouse that kept eating the seeds!), and the result is not continuous tomato production. Sign, each new season presents new problems to challenge our established growing routines and sometimes our reaction time is a bit slower than we'd like, resulting in gaps in production. The pepper production, however, is well timed and the field peppers are kicking in right as the high tunnel peppers fade. Phew!
