Lettuce leaf our salad days of August behind us as the month comes to a close, and reflect upon how apple season is already here and in full swing. What even.
In case you were wondering, it has indeed been a bit warm; the classes doing their lab work out here are absolute troopers and a very great help, so many thanks to them all, especially those who’ve been mustering through high tunnel work. The first potatoes are out of the ground, and Chris and I have been kept quite busy harvesting sweet corn and Honeycrisp apples from Miegs in recent days. Compared to last autumn, after that season’s late frost, having this much production from local trees feels faintly ridiculous – if our luck keeps running this way, maybe that elusive “good peach year” will be on our horizon.
Between our normal CSA harvests and the experiment related produce, we’ve been on the edge of running out of bins and space several times this week, resulting in some unconventional workarounds such as: watermelons in the sinks and ungodly pepper towers in the cooler. I’ve also gotten a chance to get a bit more acquainted with the bin washer, and when you are the one catching what goes through the machine, you are subsequently entirely at the mercy of whoever is loading vegetables/bins into it. It’s rare for this job to channel the same level of in-the-moment-panic I experience when I’m losing in a video game, but that’s apparently the best analogue I’ve got for trying (and failing) to sanitize and stack bins for my coworkers’ amusement. It’s a hectic time of year on its own, but temperatures like those of the last few days mean that we have to be pretty mindful of ourselves and keep an eye on each other. Be careful out there, folks! Stay hydrated.