August has a way of disappearing, even when I am keeping an eye on it all month long. We kick off the month here with a birthday celebration for Angelica. After that we always make a point to get in a few good swims at our favorite lake, along with eating plenty of ice cream. In the meantime, our days are filled with harvesting summer crops, weeding the fall crops, and making plans for the second half of our season and next year's season. We're hot and tired in August, but even these feelings pass too quickly this month. We had a pretty good harvest of melons this August, with more coming next week. And it's been a great year for tomatoes and peppers so far. Happily, even though August is about to disappear, some of these crops will continue well into September.
I've been hearing the geese overhead for two weeks now. It seems early for them to be flying by, but then I have to remind myself that I say that every year in August. The geese are getting ready for fall, and so must I. As the summer crops wind down, we can look forward to the late season crops that will start to come in. Sweet potatoes look like a bright spot for our fall CSA boxes this season. I found a few flowers on the sweet potato vines yesterday, which is quite rare here. I don't believe it means anything with regard to the coming harvest, but it was beautiful to see! I dug a few plants to check the growth of the roots, and they are already sizing up nicely. They are almost as big as our usual October harvest, and we are likely to start putting them in the CSA boxes in a couple of weeks.
A sweet potato flower. It was open when I first saw it, but had closed by the time I came back for a photo.
Cabbages are looking nice too. Our potatoes are not as prolific as last year's bumper crop, but we should still have plenty of nice, modest-sized and very tasty potoates throughout the rest of the season.
The winter squash and broccoli plants don't look super right now, but I expect we'll have a week or two of these crops, if not a little more. I just don't think we'll have bountiful amounts throughout the fall like I had planned for.
I could spend the rest of August picking Sungold cherry tomatoes, because they are ripening like crazy right now. But I think I'll squeeze in a few other activities too, before the summer disappears altogether.