As a Farmer you’ve got to train yourself to “make hay while the sun is shining”.  In season, you’re up at the crack of dawn, and work a long hard day, just about everyday.  It must be like running a marathon where you push yourself but pace yourself at the same time.  So that’s why when you see a small window of opportunity for a little R&R you get all your ducks in a row and Carpe Diem!  However, no matter how good you are at planning there are always monkey wrenches lurking in the shadows, and sometimes worse.  It’s funny how these excursions correspond to historic events and natural disaster.  Do you remember El Derecho?  I do because that was the day Eris and I decided to go to Berkeley Springs for our anniversary.  The DC Sniper? Fishing in the outer banks.  9/11?  First trip to Israel to meet Eris’ family.  So you get the picture.  That’s why this past week on June 21, I was only momentarily startled while cracking open a cold one and flipping on the TV at my brother’s “compound” at the beach to see our little farm community in Howard County making headlines for tornadoes, hurricane winds, hail the size of cantaloupes and a deluge of rain that makes you want to build an ark. My heart sank watching storm footage and all hell breaking loose on Facebook posts of some of our neighboring farms, like Milkhouse Brewery resembling typhoons.  I couldn’t get a hold of anyone and feared the worse for our newly staked little tomato plants.  But don’t worry folks, we made it out okay.  Phew! Even though the drive out to the farm looks like King Kong singing Helter Skelter, leaving a trail of destruction of fallen trees, giant limbs, and a blanket of debris, we lucked out with only a few casualties of this week’s lettuce crop and some broken tomato branches.  Could have been a lot worse.  We really dodged a bullet on that one.
So other than having a tornado run amuck in Howard County this week, in other news, we have picked about 50 bushels of squash and about twenty bushel of cucumbers.  Squash blossoms and cut basil have been a big hit, and we are in the next patch of our direct seeded crops of arugula, beets, baby kale, and baby lettuce mix.  We are in the midst of harvesting a small crop of “dunce cap” cabbage, and broccoli and plugging along at harvesting our kale and rainbow swiss chard.  It will take us until about mid-week to get back into our lettuce crop.  Fortunately we picked heavy before the storm.  We are seeing lots of flowers and fruit setting on our tomatoes and eggplants which both look super healthy and great.  We began planting sunflowers, better late than never, for a September harvest.  Thanks for reading our newsletter and have a great week everyone.