Common wisdom (perhaps apocryphally) holds that children were originally sent home from school for three months of working on the farm in the summer.  Although we're child-free by choice, I wouldn't mind a few extra field hands at this time of year.

June is the overlap zone between spring and summer, when we're harvesting honey, chickens, broccoli, peas, and greens as fast as we can, but are also nurturing the summer crops in preparation for the main event.  Meanwhile, we're starting to plant the first of the fall crops in beds freed up by the spring bounty, and Mark's mowing his heart out, trying to stay ahead of the grass.

In the winter, I literally can't remember the tastes, scents, and sights of June.  The days are so long, the garden and woods so green, that I wake up at dawn ready to get to work.  Garden tasks feel urgent --- we both know how easy it would be to lose all of our hard work in just a few weeks of getting behind on the weeding.

When the sun finally sets around 9:30, lightning bugs drifting through the garden and tree frogs calling from the floodplain, my eyelids are drooping.  We're currently subscribed to one netflix at a time, and I can't remember the last time I actually made it through the movie before falling asleep.

Which is all a long way of saying --- our lunchtime series will be going on summer vacation starting this week.  Look for a return to deep thoughts in a few months when I want to dream of the garden again, rather than live in it.  (There may be a series thrown in here and there if I just can't resist, though, so don't get your hopes up too high.)

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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