Where Did The Summer Go?

The day after Labor Day – the unofficial end to summer – began at the farm like so many others recently. We were in the fog. As we enter our third year on the hill, we are coming to understand patterns. Late summer and early fall, early mornings are really varied. Some, like on 9/2, we are in a thick pea soup (sometimes you can see the glow of the sun trying to break through over the hill to the east, sometimes not). If it happened every morning, it would probably be depressing.

Morning In The Fog

But it doesn’t. On my favorite mornings, the sun bursts over the hilltop with no clouds in sight; except when you look to the west and see a line of clouds down below us in the White River Valley, keeping the sun at bay down there for a few more hours. Some mornings, the line of clouds is down over Jericho Street, right in our neighborhood, but the house is still above it in full sunshine. It’s a little weird to head down the driveway to work around 7:40, enter into and then under the clouds. There are a lot of cloudy, cool mornings in Hanover while the farm is bathed in sunshine and ten degrees warmer.

Clouds Over White River

Clouds Over Jericho Road

And then there are mornings where everyone is below the clouds – those are so pedestrian (just kidding).

Dawn With Clouds Above

As we enter September, I find myself reflecting back on our summer. Early July we had a short spell of high heat and humidity. The house has air conditioning, which we hardly ever use, which is why there was a need to reach out to air duct cleaning austin tx before getting it to function again. The apartment, on the other hand, does not. We welcomed a couple for a two-week stay just as the heat wave hit us. We do have a floor fan in the apartment, but we feared it might not be enough. We quickly came to a sobering conclusion – if we wanted to turn on the AC in the house, we had to provide relief for the apartment. Why? The condenser unit for the AC is immediately below the bedroom window of the apartment. It just wouldn’t be fair to be cool and have that noise outside a window that would surely remain open to catch any kind of breeze.

I purchased a large window AC unit for the apartment. But before I took it out of the car, Peg and I talked it over. It would totally block half of the east facing window. We agreed a portable unit would be better, even if it isn’t as efficient. The next morning, I returned the window unit and came back at the end of the day with the portable unit. As I was working with our guests to get it set up, he said to me, “I looked out the window this morning and saw you drive off with the air conditioner box in the back of your car, and I thought WTF?!” Too funny. They were glad to have relief (as were we), and the heat wave broke a few days later.

Mid-July to early-August the weather was pretty darn nice. Not too hot, not too cool, with enough rain to keep the fields growing for the flock. We welcomed another couple for the first two weeks of August, and they got pretty much everything on the weather spectrum – beautiful warm days, some cool ones, some almost cold nights, and at least one healthy thunderstorm. We had one morning storm that came down so hard and so fast, there were a few sections of Jericho Road that were covered with gravel from runoff that overflowed roadside ditches and culverts. The town cleaned the debris up pretty quickly and rebuilt a ditch along the side of Bedell Road above Jericho Road.

Mid-August we had a cold stretch come through. Low 40s in the mornings kind of cold stretch. After that passed, the weather returned to seasonably nice.

Most weekends we were blessed with nice weather all summer long. On July 19^th, we opened our Farmers Market booth for the first time of the summer. Our “reserved” spots in the market don’t start until September 13^th (and we’ll have two more before the market moves inside in the beginning of November). Like last year, we didn’t ask for market spots until after Labor Day. Two reasons: 1) we think people don’t typically want to buy yarn during the hot summer months, and 2) we weren’t sure when we would get this year’s yarn from the mill.

But when we got an email from Steve the market manager about openings for July 19^th, we decided to go for it. (He typically sends out an email on Monday offering one or a few openings based on cancellations.) We had blankets, a lamb fleece, some recently hand-dyed Merino yarn (by Peg and her sister), natural colored Merino yarn, a few skeins of our brown Corriedale yarn, along with our knitted and woven goods. Also, any time/space at the Farmer’s Market we view as “advertising” opportunities for the apartment.

The morning was glorious. Warm, but not too hot. The booth we were given was so small (and came with built-in shelves) we couldn’t set up our canopy if we wanted. Steve later apologized for not telling us the booth isn’t covered (several of the permanent ones are), but a tarp wouldn’t have made much difference.

The booth’s location was pretty nice – right along one of three entrances to the market – a lot of traffic. We got set up a few minutes before nine, and waited with no expectations.

It was our best day at the market ever.

• Nine dyed skeins
• Six natural skeins
• Two lap blankets
• One queen blanket
• The lamb fleece
• One knit hat
• One woven scarf

We were amazed! I came away with two thoughts: 1) if the dyed yarn is selling, I need to help Peg with the dyeing, and 2) once we get this year’s yarn, we should be in as many markets as we can.

The next weekend, Michael surprised us by delivering the yarn on his way to visit other customers. We had about 500 skeins of yarn in a wide variety of colors. Three Sundays in August (including Labor Day weekend) Peg and I dyed up nine skeins of Merino yarn.

Dyed Yarn

We got spots in the market on August 9^th:

• Three dyed skeins
• Nine natural skeins
• One lap blanket
• One Savage Hart Farm notecard (!)

August 9 Market Booth

Yarn On Display

and the market on August 23rd.

• Eight natural skeins
• One rag rug
• One knit hat
• One woven scarf
• A pair of knit and dyed mittens

(Actually, we only sold the eight skeins at the 8/23 market, but our friends David and Karen who saw us at the market and came to dinner that night got a private showing and purchased all the other goods.)

We asked to be in the market on August 16^th, but got shut out. We wanted to be in the market the first Saturday in September (LABOR DAY WEEKEND!), but Steve told me the cancellations came so late, he didn’t resort to email to fill them – we clearly need to get on Steve’s “go to” list.

Well, that’s the summer. Wait, there’s one more highlight. The last weekend in July – Kate, Colin, Lori, and Jason all arrived at the farm Thursday night. Friday afternoon we all drove up to Shelburne Farms south of Burlington for an evening outdoor concert by Nickel Creek. The night was hazy, the music was wonderful.

Nice Night for a Concert

Nickel Creek

• Seeing the last stages of shed construction (concrete pad, underground electric and water lines are all in) – Carl began cutting and building last week
• Taking delivery (finally?) of our new 38 HP John Deere tractor – should be in the next 10 days, but we’ve been pushed off twice now
• Actually taking some vacation time – we’ve got a short two-night-off-the-farm trip to Manchester and Burlington scheduled for later in the month with farm sitting to be provided by Meegan and Ari!

Todd