August on the farm can be a funny time of year.

From the outside, it seems like this ought to be the absolute peak of summer abundance—and in many ways it is. But there is often a bit of an ebb in the produce supply about now, especially after a very hot July.

Plants pay attention to the weather even when the effects aren’t immediately obvious. Tomatoes, for example, can struggle to set fruit when daytime and nighttime temperatures stay too high. We may not notice much at the time; the plants are still green and growing, and we’re still picking tomatoes that were pollinated weeks earlier. But several weeks later, the consequences show up in the harvest.

So some of what we’re experiencing in August was actually determined back in July.

The same is true in different ways for other crops. Prolonged heat puts stress on plants, slows some things down, speeds other things up, and generally reminds us that farming isn’t a factory where the same inputs reliably produce the same outputs. We plant, irrigate, cultivate, trellis, and harvest, but we’re always doing those things within conditions we don’t control.

And lately, the heat itself has simply been hard. By afternoon, both plants and people can look a little tired of summer.

But one of the gifts of working outside every day is that the difficult parts of the weather aren’t the whole story.

There are mornings when the air is surprisingly cool, and for an hour or two it feels almost like fall is giving us a preview. There are evenings when the western sky turns deep red and orange as the sun goes down. Dew catches the early light. And this time of year, spiderwebs seem to appear everywhere—sometimes stretched improbably between plants or across a pathway, each one an intricate little piece of engineering that wasn’t there the evening before.

It’s easy to walk through them face-first and be less impressed.

But when we slow down enough to actually see them, they’re another reminder of how much beauty surrounds us in the midst of ordinary work.

That’s one of the tensions of farming that I continue to appreciate. A week can be hot and exhausting. A harvest can be smaller than we hoped. Crops can struggle, and plans can fail. And at almost the same moment, there can be something breathtaking happening right beside us.

Creation doesn’t cease to be beautiful because conditions are difficult.

So we’re continuing through this late-summer stretch—harvesting what the fields are giving us, caring for the crops that are struggling through the heat, and beginning to look toward fall.

And we’re trying to remember to notice the cool mornings, the red sunsets, and even the spiderwebs along the way.

– Farmer Curtis

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