Good market, long week ahead

Market was great this morning. Gorgeous weather, lots of customers, had no trouble effectively selling out. I was really tired, but for whatever reason wasn't feeling any outward symptoms of the lingering nasty cold, so was comfortable handling & selling produce. When I got home, though, I crashed and am now on the couch listening to baseball while getting up just often enough to monitor a 2-gallon batch of cheese.

The coming week will be tough but productive. We're forecast for sunny mid-upper 80s all week, with very high humidity due to the super-saturated ground. Even though this isn't all that unusual for Missouri, the NWS has a warning out because no one's adapted to these sticky conditions all the sudden after months of cool, cloudy, and wet weather.

As the ground dries out and the soil warms up, we have a huge project list to undertake. Just about every kind of summer item needs to be seeded and/or transplanted, often into beds that still need some hoeing and shaping since it's been too wet to do this properly. Corn, green beans, okra, peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, edamame, drying beans, squash, etc. Many of these haven't gone out yet because it's been so wet and cold that we felt we'd do worse to put them out, due to cold soil temperatures and increased disease potential. For example, our first plantings of edamame and green beans never germinated, because the soil T crashed 10 degrees just after we seeded them due to nearly two weeks of clouds & rain.

So don't expect much blogging this week. When the sun rises tomorrow, we're focusing solely on catching up and taking advantage of sunny & dry conditions; it will take us all week to even hope to get back on track, provided we get our energy back after a week of feeling sick.