July is full of risk and opportunity. What we do from now to the beginning of August will pretty much determine the final trajectory of the season. After that point, very little we do will change things, so staying on point and hustling now are paramount.

Which is not to say it’s easily done. Just this morning I was standing with crew member Hannah in front of the chalkboard I use to list the week’s tasks, unsure of where to begin. What’s most important today? Transplanting the fall cabbage crops so we have food to harvest for the shares in October and November? Finishing laying the drip irrigation on the crops behind the deer fence so we can be sure to keep them thriving throughout this dry spell? Or weeding the sweet peppers? Or the broccoli? Or the beans? Or chasing down another of the other eight things on the list?

We opted to finish running the irrigation, then to begin transplanting, and to tackle the weeds later in the week. Was that the right decision? We’ll know in a month.

While this is week three for our CSA members, for me it’s more like week twenty. (With maybe another twenty to go, but who’s counting?) So I’m about halfway through my season, with the summer solstice right at the pivot point, which seems fitting. We’ve moved from that first awakening at the beginning of March and the start of work in the greenhouse, and we watched that work crescendo up to and through the start of May, right around when field work began. May was madness, seeing us move from field to greenhouse and back again, the days full of field preparation, greenhouse seeding, and transplanting. With June, we spent most of our time in the field, transplanting and seeding all our major crops, plus making time for cultivating and weeding.

Now most of that labor is behind us. Much of the greenhouse work is done for the year, and the only major field work remaining is transplanting the fall brassicas in July. (The brassica family includes cabbages, kale, collards, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, and many more.) There’s still plenty of other work to be done, of course—weeding, cultivating, scouting for pests and diseases, trellising tomatoes, and harvesting, harvesting, harvesting. But hitting that solstice pivot point is a chance to take one deep breath and a swift admiring glance at all the work we’ve done, then dive back into the new cycle.

And all told, things have been going well for us so far this season. While our greenhouse and transplanting schedules did go a touch askew there in the spring, they didn’t stray far, and we’re now back on track and should stay there for the rest of the season. The weather wasn’t too wacky, and though that August heat in June did stress out some of the cool-season crops—and made me a little nervous—most crops pulled though and are looking fine now. (We did loose some head lettuce and Asian greens to heat stress, but not enough to make a difference.) The dry spells haven’t been enduring, nor have we had storms bring too much rain all at once. Our pest pressure has been a gallery of the usual suspects—flea beetles, Colorado potato beetles, thrips, aphids, imported cabbage worm—but none have been overwhelming. And, above all, the crew has been exemplary, leaning into the work with enthusiasm and good cheer.

All of which is to say, I’m grateful for these gifts over the past twenty weeks and am eager and expectant to see what the next twenty will bring.

Last Thursday, while transplanting lettuce, the crew disturbed a nesting killdeer. We knew she had a nest nearby from the way she performed her broken-wing act—fluttering as though she was injured, hoping to draw any threat toward her and away from her eggs. I love watching that bit of bird behavior, love how the killdeer, once you approach her, will swiftly move further away, then repeat the whole routine.

Since killdeer like to nest in open spaces, like farm fields, they’re vulnerable to farm activities like plowing and mowing. And the nests, even though out in the open, are remarkably well camouflaged and surprisingly difficult to find on foot, let alone to see from a tractor’s seat. So we took a moment to hunt for the nest and, once found, to mark it with a bright survey flag. And yesterday, while making beds in that plot, I was able to pass over that little bit of the field and leave her nest and the four speckled eggs in it undisturbed.

Maybe I’m being overly sentimental and romantic, but I think taking care of creatures like the killdeer and the barn swallows and the tree frogs and the snapping turtles is just as much a part of my job as is growing vegetables. Or, better, my growing vegetables here in this place requires me to keep in mind the whole web of life of this place. So I use organic sprays that won’t harm amphibians, and I set out nest boxes for bluebirds and tree swallows, and I leave some spaces on the edges of the farm ragged and unkempt and natural so the creatures here have places to hunt and to hide, to forage and to frolic. And I think the farm is a better place for it.

May, and the farm is springing to life. The daffodils are now in full bloom, their yellow heads nodding in the breeze. It’s warm enough to let the chickens outside of their winter quarters, and they’ve been spending their days happily scratching in the soil for tasty bugs and worms. And in the field, the garlic and the rhubarb are thrusting the green fingers of their first leaves through the straw mulch layered on their beds. The farm work is springing to life, too. Each season, I’m always surprised by how April goes from a dead standstill to a full sprint that lasts from now until the beginning of August.

This spring we made the big decision to have the field tiled, which finally happened late last month. This entailed having some really big equipment on the farm to lay perforated drain pipe deep in the subsoil to help the field drain more quickly. Long term, this investment should eliminate all the time we currently lose to waiting for the soil to dry out after big rainstorms, which is great. In the short term, however, it means we weren’t able to get into the field at all until after the tiling was completed, so we have a little catching up to do, seeing as how the greenhouse is jam packed with plants ready to get out into the field. This coming week should see us catching up with our spring seeding and transplanting and should put us on track for the start of the CSA in June.

We’re caught in-between right now, our days swinging from bright, balmy spring promises to cold, gray snow-flecked winter reminders. The fields lie bare and barren, the meadow matted and faded, all the farm littered with winter’s scattered debris.

Yet spring stirs. The light strengthens. Here and there new green growth pushes though the soil–rumors of crocuses and daffodils, garlic and rhubarb. And the other day I heard the high trill of the red-winged blackbird, recently returned from wintering down south, so I know the new season is nigh.

Which means I’d better hop to it. March is the month when I need to finish my season’s planning and start putting those plans into action. For starters, we begin seeding in the greenhouse this week, in my mind the point when the season truly begins, when the year’s wheel begins its long rotation through the farming cycle. It’s good to be here for another go-around.

This past fall I came across a Wendell Berry passage that struck a chord. (For those of you who don’t know, Mr. Berry is a farmer-poet from Kentucky, now in his eighties, who has been writing on agrarian themes for going on sixty years now.) His words are good enough to quote at length:

“There is a kind of idealism that seems to be native to farming. Farmers begin every year with a vision of perfection. And every year, in the course of the seasons and the work, this vision is relentlessly whittled down to a real result–by human frailty and fallibility, by the mortality of creatures, by pests and diseases, by the weather. The crop year is a long struggle, ended invariably not by the desired perfection but by the need to accept something less than perfection as the best that could be done.” [From Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy, Wendell Berry (University Press of Kentucky: 2004)]

I was struck by these words because they so perfectly describe each season’s farming experience. I do start the year with such a “vision of perfection.” I have certainly felt that relentless whittling down. (What a perfect description that is!) And the challenges Mr. Berry lists crisply outline the things that can keep me up at night.

All of which is to say, I suppose, that farming is one long schooling in hope, expectation, and, above all, faith. In writing those words, I fear they sound exalted or pretentious, or worse, pious. But the reality they attempt to describe is far more homely. Tasks like drafting the budget, working out the seed order, plotting out the year’s work, and hiring the crew–all these jobs are done in hope of a good season and with faith that all will be well.

Yesterday was the winter solstice, so, as farmers have done for thousands of years, I went out last evening, lit a bonfire, and thought about the past season and the one to come.

The past couple of months have seen us getting the farm ready for winter, doing chores like securing the greenhouse against the cold and snow, mulching the garlic beds, moving the chickens to their cold-weather housing, and putting all the tools and supplies back in their places. And the weather had been so mild that we were able to go to market up to the second weekend of December, which brought a little bit of welcome extra income.

All those jobs are pretty well wrapped up, and it’s time for me to start laying the groundwork for next season. To tell the truth, I’ve already been thinking about it, imagining what new possibilities could be in store for us. Now comes the work of making those ideas real. The first step will be drafting the budget, and then laying out the field plan and seeding schedule so that I can put together the farm’s seed order, which will need to be placed the first or second week of January. There will be research to do, as well as marketing for the 2018 CSA. And then come March 1 or thereabouts, I will fire up the greenhouse, open that big bag of potting soil, and sink my hands deep into the possibilities of next season. I can’t hardly wait.