While we're missing our tomatoes, the farm staff has been eating well -- roasted veggie quesadillas and enchiladas have been making appearances in our lunches, along with delicious cucumber salads, pesto, eggplant spreads, potato salads and gallons of refrigerator and lacto-fermented pickles. We hope many of these same dishes are bringing abundance to your tables as well. Early September, only a few weeks away, will mark the big shift to fall crops, with broccoli, cauliflower, leeks and storage onions making their first appearance of the season and cabbage, spinach and other salad greens re-emerging for the duration of the fall. 

We were so grateful for the outpouring of folks who came to help us weed brussels sprouts, hot peppers, and carrots last week.  Despite the challenges of the season, the mood in the brussels sprouts on a beautiful Saturday morning was cheerful.  While we did talk about the late blight epidemic, singing and laughing predominated as weeders shared recipes (including Lou Paap's for a delicious-sounding green tomato pizza), tried to remember tunes about carrots and brussels sprouts, and worked their way through the entire multi-bed planting in a morning.  Laurie Rothstein and Mark Simmons arrived in their Waltham Fields t-shirts and weeded several beds on their own.  Helene Newberg and her family, despite piano lessons and an injured thumb, were core members of the crew.  Children moved in and out of the weeding team, looking for bugs, trying to guess the name of the next crop over, and exploring the best way to really get the weeds out of the field. 

After a morning of walking through the dying blighted tomato plants, trying to salvage a few green tomatoes from the remains of the crop, it lightened our spirits to have a chance to work with so many of our shareholders and friends in what one weeder called "weeding meditation," helping ensure that our fall crops had the best possible chance to flourish.  Farming is an occupation where our highest expectations, for ourselves and the land, are constantly met with the physical limitations of the human body and the soil and the weather.  Our joy in the work that we do has been tested this season by frustration and disappointment.  Sometimes a break in the action and an opportunity to converse with our shareholders, to hear their perspectives and the news from other lives and the other important pieces of the movement of which we are a small part, is just the breath of fresh air that we need.  We appreciate the help, and the companionship and solidarity, so very much.