Not long ago, someone asked us what time we farmers get up in the morning.

I looked at my fellow farmer, who seemed too sleepy to comprehend the question, and then I answered: “Well, in the beginning of the season, we’re working in the garden by 5 a.m. But this time of year? We feel like we’re doing pretty well to be out there by 6:30 in the morning.”

Yes, indeed, we get wearier and wearier as the season goes on, and we are hard-pressed to motivate ourselves to work until 9 p.m., as we also do earlier in the season. We are not sorry that the sunlight slowly starts decreasing at the June solstice. We are happy, and we are even happier, here in September, for the slowly increasing sleep-time.

Now we’ve started compiling a sleepy farmer list:

Example One: As with most people, when we are tired, our brains slow down too. In fact, as I was trying to divide the number of tomatoes we’d harvested one September day by the number of CSA members who were coming, in order to figure out everyone’s share of the harvest, I came up with quite a number: 2,904.

“Wow!” I said to my fellow. “Every member gets 2,904 tomatoes today!”

“Wow!” he said back. “No wonder we’re so tired!”

Then we had a big laugh, imagining 25 people putting 2,904 tomatoes in their baskets and bags, and stuffing them to their cars, and hauling them into their kitchens.

Then we had an even bigger laugh, because I was doing my hard math with a calculator, not even with my brain, and still the tomatoes came out to 2,904. I tried again, really concentrating on those little buttons, and that time I got 17.

Now that’s a reasonable number of tomatoes, especially if you are throwing them all in a big pot and making sauce, as we are this time of year, which is what we told our CSA members who thought 17 tomatoes, particularly when combined with the quarts of cherry and plum tomatoes for the day, was less reasonable than we did. Of course, the members had no idea how narrowly they missed 2,904 tomatoes.

Example Two: This year, in an effort to save our fall brassicas from flea beetles and woodchucks, we covered the plants with our fancy new bug netting, which worked wonderfully, with two exceptions.

Exception One: The woodchuck cleverly dug a tunnel that came up right under the beautifully protected-from-detection-and-predators bug netting. Thus, when we pulled off the cover to get at the weeds, we found: the weeds, the woodchuck hole, and the chewed-on broccoli and kale, which is enough to make a weary farmer cry, and which is not even the point of this story.

The point of this story is Exception Two: we also found two plantings of lettuce, which we had totally forgotten were there, and which were not able to muscle their way past the weeds as the brassicas did.

“Did we plant these here?” I said, knowing full well that no one else plants anything here.

My fellow shook his head in disbelief. “If we did, I wish we had weeded them a lot sooner.”

Oh, the poor tiny forgotten heads of lettuce. At least the woodchuck hadn’t chewed on them. (Plus the woodchuck only made a tunnel under the broccoli/kale lettuce netting and not the separate netting for the cabbage/Brussels sprouts next door. Wasn’t that thoughtful?)

Example Three: One September morning I woke up to find an unripe cherry tomato in my hair. It spent all night in bed with me, apparently.

“Look at this,” I said to my fellow farmer, untangling the hard little green tomato.

“Wow,” my fellow said, and fell back to sleep. Zzzz.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Sept 21-27, 2022

Here it is August, and this vegetable farmer is stuck in July. I’m stuck in July because that’s where my fellow farmer and I always get stuck. What with harvesting, haying, planting the fall crops, and weeding, we don’t know which way to turn.

The real kicker in July is the raspberries. We love raspberries, but, wow, it’s a lot of picking. (29 quarts! Seven hours! On just one day!)

First our CSA members pick all their own quarts during CSA pick-up hours, working mostly along the edges of the patch. Afterward, I plow up the center, and try not to fall into the woodchuck hole, which we have filled in numerous times, and which the woodchuck gleefully clears out, hurling all the rocks and dirt right out again.

In fact, once I was picking berries, and there was the woodchuck peering up out of the hole. “What are you going to do?” I said to this beautiful worried little critter. “Besides eat all my brassicas, I mean.”

In and out the furry brown nose and bright eyes went, and finally, working up an enormous courage, the woodchuck darted out and ran. Goodness! It was exciting. I’m not sure why the chuckie didn’t turn around and go back down the tunnel to another exit, but clearly he or she had another idea in mind, probably involving the delicious broccoli.

I also spend some time in the center of the raspberry patch detaching myself from the blackberry canes. We keep chopping them out, and they keep growing gleefully back in. Those thorns are powerfully sharp.

Of course, it is our own fault, as we were the ones who planted the canes next to the raspberries in the first place. It seemed like a great idea at the time, transplanting some vigorous wild blackberries into the garden. Our old-time Vermonter farmer friend said, “Oh, you’re going to be sorry you did that,” and oh, was he right.

Then there was the bird, hollering its head off at me in the raspberry patch.

“What’s the trouble?” I asked. But then I saw the trouble. It was a perfectly lovely little nest, with four perfectly lovely little speckled eggs. I carefully worked my way around the nest. The bird didn’t settle down until I was a good distance away.

Three days later, I was picking again, and now two birds were hollering, and there were four naked little squirmers in the nest. In another few days there were four feathered squirmers in the nest, and I carefully showed the spot to my fellow farmer, who had come to join me in picking.

“What are they doing?” I whispered. I was worried because it had just been sprinkling. “What do chicks do when it’s raining?”

“They’re all tucked in,” my fellow said. “They’re taking a little nap. And the leaves are covering them. I can hardly see them.”

“Oh, good,” I said, but then on the next picking day I was even more worried, because I couldn’t see them at all: the nest was empty. The parents were still hollering around, carrying choice bits of chick-food, but there were no birdies in the nest.

I went and worried to my fellow, about how maybe I should have put a little fence around the chicks. Maybe an overeager CSA member picking raspberries had accidentally dumped them out of the nest, too early.

“No, no,” said my fellow, “If the parents are still feeding them, the chicks are around somewhere.”

So I did a little chipping sparrow research, and it seems like the chicks were right on schedule, with the parents carrying around snacks for the hidden fledglings. I was pretty pleased about that, and I was also pretty pleased that the raspberries had about finished. July was over, and it was time to fly like a bird, or run like a woodchuck, or at least gimp like a farmer, into August.

Originally published in The Monadnock Shopper News, Aug 24 -- Aug 30, 2022

Farm Talk

Kim Peavey