The Light

Posse!  I was going to bail on you today (Monday-for-Tuesday post) and tell you I gotz Nuthin’!  because I was starting to feel a little gloomy –  then I had to run errands that took me out of town and into the fields.

Turns out, I gotz a LOT!  Lemme tell you what’s going on in my world right now.

We’re shifting from Summer to Autumn much faster than anticipated (at least anticipated by this particular lima bean – probably some Farmer’s Almanac readers already knew this 😉 –  our temperatures have dropped like a stone – last week it was high 90s – low 70s (if we were lucky) and now it’s high 70!!  (note there is NO ‘s’) and lows in the 50s!  Yikes.  It’s getting way darker, way earlier and it doesn’t get light at 5:30a like it did in early July.  I miss it.  We’re not quiiite at ‘frost is on the pumpkin’ stage but at least one crop of hay really is already in the barn.

I’m starting to think about making cinnamon rolls again.

I drove around with a cantaloupe on the back seat ; I was at a friend’s farm yesterday and got a tutorial on how to determine the ripeness, as we picked through the tendrils.  Watermelons are not quite ready – and that’s an interesting ‘learn’ because, of course, watermelons are considered the Essence of Summer – but (here) LOCAL watermelons don’t really ripen until near-early September!

But back to that cantaloupe:  a truly vine-ripened cantaloupe smells like nothing less than Heaven.  As with peaches, it’s the ‘smell idea’ of the fruit as much as the fruit itself – and that’s where the perfume comes in.  A really good, organic melon (which this kinda is – I suspect they spray for insects but it’s a small, family patch, not Big Ag, so…) has a bunch of naturally occurring aromatic esters not found in melons shipped green and gassed into ripeness.  The smell is incredible!  Of course, if it goes too far, then you get a bit of that nail polish (acetone) smell – it’s the ethyl acetate, which is natural (I looked it up).  But even that is interesting … because perfumistas are weird.

Everything is still green… but there’s that subtle shift in light that highlights what’s to come – the field corn is still fully green, but the cobs are just starting to think about turning.  It’ll be awhile before they’re ready for harvest ( farmers want them really dry) but you can tell they’re considering it. The cobs.  Not the farmers.  They wait for the corn to tell them it’s Time.

Beans (soy) ?  That’ll be awhile to come – they usually harvest through December! around here.  I remember when I first moved to this Big Ag part of the world and was stunned at the difference between gardening and agriculture, finding it fascinating that they wait until soybeans look like desiccated weeds before putting the combines in the field.  Right now they still have that sticky-waxy smell (and feel – opening a bean pod is like spilling glue on yourself)

Did I mention the light?  The sky is that ‘different’ blue – more vivid, the clouds standing out in stark contrast.

Still thinking about those cinnamon rolls…

what about you?  are you feeling the slow shift?  Are you thinking about cinnamon rolls?