August is...well, just August

August in Georgia has only one mitigating virtue: that from within it, one can just see autumn on the horizon.

The record-setting three-week heat wave seems to have broken, if you are prepared to accept the idea that a drop from the 105 range into the mid-90s represents the end of a heat wave. The one thing that makes it feel real is that we are getting a few refreshing, life-giving thunderstorms.

I think the heat wave may have killed our tiny nascent farmers' market. For three weeks, because the National Weather Service was rightfully telegraphing DEATH DEATH DEATH about the idea of spending any time outdoors, we were forced to cancel. This week, after enthusiastic e-mails to our customer base, we started up again. But we had only one visitor, and she was one of our vendors. That's what you call a small turnout. People are creatures of habit, and the hiatus undid whatever shopping habits we had managed to inspire.

But believe it or not, we are okay with this turn of events. We've slowly been coming to the realization that (a) our town may not be quite ready for a farmers' market, and (b) there are a lot of new farmers' markets in the area, each with not very many vendors. So we spent our idle hours last night hatching some plans for a tiny, just-us-neighbors gardening collective. One entity; a few back yards. Instead of adding another marginal farmers' market to the fray, we'll team up to take our wares to some of the existing outlets. More on that next year, I think.

Meanwhile, it is still the dog days of summer. L2 and I sat, flushed with plans for World Domination via backyard market gardening (or was it the humidity?), and picked out our seeds for fall planting. I ordered them all last night.

Time to start pulling out spent plants and dreaming of cool leafy things. We'll plant as soon as we can get the beds prepared.