The rain this past week was great -- just enough to help our newly planted fall crops begin to root in and grow. By the time you read this, our fall planting push will be coming to an end and we will be gearing up for our full-scale harvest season as tomatoes, peppers and eggplant begin to form and ripen on the plants. Thank you to everyone who did a little rain dance for us during the dry spell.

Dry weather, of course, has its benefits as well. So far this season, we have not had to deal with many disease problems, many of which are spread during wet and very hot conditions. Many early season pests were not as bad this season, although we definitely had our share of our usual cabbage and onion maggots. We have seen only about 2 potato beetles this year, which can be a terrible pest for us even though we are not growing potatoes. We are having trouble with Mexican bean beetles, as we usually do, and this season is particularly bad for leaf hoppers, which generally affect potatoes, but are choosing our beans in the potatoes' absence.

More cilantro and dill are on the way, and should just about coincide with the beginning of tomato season. Our second seeding was overcome by weeds before it had a chance to germinate, so we are waiting for the third one to come along.

Cukes, squash and watermelon plants are recovering from the damage done by the woodchucks at our Lyman Estate field. It was looking like we would probably have a decent, if late, crop of squash and a smaller than average crop of cucumbers, but I noticed on Thursday afternoon that the woodchucks are now eating the squash themselves. We'll see whether we can outwit them again. The cucumbers and squash that you've been eating up to now have been provided by Jenny and Bruce Wooster at Picadilly Farm in Winchester, New Hampshire - you'll be seeing more of Jenny and Bruce's produce in August when they bring us potatoes.

Melons will likely be along in mid- to late August. Many shareholders asked us to try growing seedless watermelons - they are easier to eat than the seeded varieties, especially for our many families with small children. We ordered seed from Johnny's, which cost more than twice as much as our normal watermelon seeds. The seeds require a certain amount of coddling in the greenhouse - they like to be no cooler than 80 degrees and drier than the usual watermelon seeds, otherwise they do not germinate well, as we discovered to our chagrin when we tossed them in alongside our hardy standby watermelons. When they did germinate, the plants were not as vigorous as our regular watermelon plants, but we did manage to set a few out into the field, next to a crop of seeded watermelons, which they require for pollination. It should be interesting to see how they produce compared to the regular watermelons.

Since Mark is teaching the Children's Learning Garden programs on the farm this summer, our house has been full of a discussion of life cycles, food webs and garden ecology. Our son Jonah, now 4 years old, is particularly interested in the multitude of ladybug larvae, beetles, millipedes, rabbits, birds and flowers that inhabit the farm along with the vegetables, and in what he can fathom of their complex web of relationships, both harmful and beneficial. As he put it, "I'm really into this farm stuff."

One of the things that fascinates him the most is the idea of who eats whom in the garden and on the farm, and what each creature gives back to the whole system. This concept took on a whole new life when we joined a local meat CSA this spring after years of vegetarianism. Sun, air, water and soil feed the grass, grass feeds the cow, and the cow feeds us, though not without a few complicated conversations. At the end of one of these, which not coincidentally occurred during a dinner of steak tacos, Jonah looked at us and said "if the cow feeds us, who do we feed?" The answer that came out of my mouth surprised me (did I really just say that?), although it probably should not have: "We feed the compost pile and the soil. Good compost and good soil is the highest aim of humankind."

Whenever a volunteer group comes onto the farm for a few hours of work with our farm staff, we assemble them in a circle and begin the day by asking each individual to think about his or her own connections to farming and to local food. The answers we hear range from someone's first encounter with a real peach or tomato at a farmstand in their home town to memories of grandparents' gardens in faraway countries - but nearly everyone has a deep, emotional connection to authentic food and the land on which it was grown. Then we ask whether they have a sense of what organic farming is. Almost everyone does, and almost without exception it is a sense of what organic farming is not: it is farming that does not use chemical pesticides, and does not use chemical fertilizers, and tries not to degrade the land and the people in the process of growing food. So what is it? The answer, not surprisingly, is very similar to the one I gave Jonah about humans' place in the food chain: organic farming is agriculture that feeds the soil so that the soil feeds the plants. We start at the bottom and try our best to feed the whole. Without any doubt, growing good compost and good soil are the highest aim of the organic farmer.

When I really starting thinking about this (on the tractor, where most of my most complex thinking gets done), I realized that I was being narrow minded about this concept in an essential way, and that is that I was considering the soil the bottom of the food chain. This is where organic farming gets it right. Even though the living soil is a somewhat mysterious, often microscopic component of the work that we do on an organic farm, much less visible than the crops or the bugs or the birds, and even though its physical location beneath our feet tends to make it feel like the bottom of something, it is only the bottom in that it is a foundation, a fundament without which nothing else can be. In all other senses, of course, the system on the farm is much more like a cycle and a web than a linear chain, and so it is with our participation in the food system if we choose to try to make it that way. When you look at it this way, we feed the soil because, by doing so, we are feeding ourselves, our friends and neighbors, and our children.

There's more to this story, of course. We can choose to take shortcuts to feeding ourselves, which is where chemical fertilizers come into play. And we can choose to take shortcuts to eating, which is where processed foods (though Lord, how the busy mama loves them) come into play. And we can choose to take shortcuts to feeding our neighbors, which is where inequity in our food system comes into play. But what we are slowly, painfully coming to realize is that the shortcuts save us time in the short run, but they cost us in the long run: our soil, our health, the health of our community. And this is one of the things we are trying to do, many small farmers and the thousands of people who support them - to unmake our perception as a society that the fundamentals can be overlooked, to return to the knowledge that the so-called "bottom" of our food chain is really our foundation, to the awareness of interdependence and complexity and of the simplicity of good, healthy food for all of us.

That's what it's all about, all this "farm stuff." Please forgive my soapbox, and thank you for being a part of it. Enjoy the harvest.