Two Teens!: Summer Week #13 – 9/3/25

Sometimes August feels like it will never end. The heat of the summer wears on us. Every employee reports in their check-in how hard August feels. The slow down their body feels with the accumulated heat of the summer, week upon week.

And then all of the sudden, it breaks. These last couple of weeks are major rewards to those of working outside. It is dazzling out there. Cool and cozy and damp in the morning, and then just enough sun to warm us up and feel good on our skin by midday. Perfection.

Coming right along with this break in heat is a milestone of every season – our middle daughter’s birthday, which also marks the beginning of the season’s downslope.

Sora was born on actual labor day in 2012, after a summer of record breaking drought. I remember being heavy with her, doing silly pregnant lady rain dances. That’s how dry it was. I was so hot and uncomfortable. Farming was never harder for me than it was that season. By late August, I remember asking Michael to drive me around the farm fields in the old green golf cart and begging him not to slow down on the bumps. I was hoping I could convince her to come with all the jerking and bouncing. But as she still does, Sora does things on her own time and in her own way.

Tomorrow she turns 13! That means we will have 2 teenage daughters in the family now. Just as August sometimes feels like it will never end and then does, it seemed impossible to imagine this fiesty little toddler ever growing up. And now here she is a teenager. Change always comes – even when it seems impossibly far off.

Not only is her 13th birthday a landmark for both her and us as her parents, her birthday in general always marks what I call the downslope of the season. We are at week 13 in the summer veggie share season. From this point forward in the season, everything just feels easier. The next 7 weeks will fly by at a pace that feels so much faster than the weeks that preceded it.

There is still PLENTY to do in the fields still. In fact, we just hired a new full-time to help us bring in the fall harvest. There are winter squash, carrots, beets, cabbages, potatoes, leeks, celeriac, sweet potatoes, and radishes that all need to start coming out of the ground. And yet, these next weeks will fly.

There is an ease now in the season. No more planting. No more seeding. Weed pressure is lessening exponentially. There are just fewer and fewer things we need to keep track of. Mostly now we just harvest… and harvest… and harvest! And this feels easier and less chaotic than other parts of the season.

Simultaneously we now have 2 teens AND we’ve reached the beginning of the downslope of the season. A very, very nice time to be a farmer.

Sincerely,
Farmer Cassie