So we have a blind chicken this year. When Joan Jett lost her sight a couple of months back, it didn’t go well for her at first. She could find her way in and out of the coop, and maybe to the waterers, but she couldn’t get to the food before all the sighted members of the flock – and couldn’t navigate the social order.

Fortunately we humans eventually realized what was wrong, and isolated her in a private coop with her own water and food. She looked rough, and I thought she might falter and pass, but she grew stronger and seemed to thrive, even. She passed the summer regaining her luster, listening intently to the vibrant world around her, her sisters and daughters and rooster admirerers visiting through the chickenwire of her gated community of one.

She looked better, and I think I can tell that she doesn’t find her more limited lifestyle repressing. Last week, someone asked if she is still laying eggs – nope, I said – either the same illness that took our her optic nerves also messed up her reproductive system, or, well, stressed hens won’t lay eggs – so maybe it’s not easy for her being blind … which didn’t sit well with me, as I didn’t want to induce an existence of suffering, and it kinda-maybe-probably contradicted my just-stated subjective belief that she looked well in the way she held her head, the shine of her feathers, the way she looked around, sightlessly but still tuned in.

Yesterday, Otis announced that he’d noticed two eggs in her coop! I was … skeptical. I wanted to believe. But the eggs were strangely positioned, not in a depression but willy-nilly against the wall … the one with the access hatch. Which made me think that Otis might be playing a prank on me. When interrogated, he promised innocence … but sure acted guilty to my eyes. So I told him that I wasn’t sure what to think yet, but he remained my primary suspect….

Well, he was telling the truth.

Today while we harvested your veggies, she laid another, back in the far side of her coop. So Joan Jett’s recovery is official, Otis’s word can be trusted, my bullshit detector can’t, and if anyone wants to adopt a blind hen before winter, let me know. She’s a survivor, a good listener, and will make someone a lovely animal friend.

I didn’t get any updated photos of her this week, all glossy and iridescent, but I did get these:

inside box Fifteen

• Broccoli – hydrocooled for freshness!
• Hakurei Salad Turnips
• Red Potatoes – best for uses where they need to hold their shape, such as potato salad, roasting, boiling, and soups, because their waxy, low-starch texture prevents them from becoming mushy. They also make great smashed (not mashed) potatoes, adding color and a satisfying crispness.
  

• Onions
• Sweet Peppers – still mostly green, this is a year that peppers refuse to ripen it seems
• Thyme

• Tomatoes
• Cherry Tomatoes
• Eggplant

• Zucchini
• Bok Choi – Kristin is considering the stems as a celery substitute for ants on a log. Or dipping them into the oddly compelling fruity Mexican hot sauce we have.
• Winter Squash – You got one of these pictured, can you find yours?

Oh, and I was also wrong about the whippoorwills – they’re still here, and back to their nightly serenading.

The high tunnel chicken fence has successfully repelled the barbarian bawk bawk horde, but the tomato plants have definitely taken some damage from the cold nights this week – we went down into the lower thirties. That also killed the melon vines, scorched the zucchini leaves, and very nearly got us to fire up the wood stove. But not quite. Maybe next time.

For now, warmer air has returned, although without any of the sticky heat of late August. The leaves have started to shift into the yellow side of the green spectrum, the whippoorwills have headed South, and the mice that Ranger hasn’t consumed are busy building nests in every dang thing.

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• Oregano – pizza sauce? Dry it for later? Roasted tomatoes? Repels shape-shifters and kobolds.
• Kohlrabi – edible greens on a delicious … bulb thing. Peel and slice and ingest with or without salt and such. Or you could roast it, stir fry it, or feed to a tortoise.
• Brussels Sprouts & Tops – the leaves can be chopped and added to the kohlrabi greens. Or if you’re roasting or sauteeing the sprouts, you can just chop and add them toward the end of the cooking
• Cherry Tomatoes
• Spaghetti Squash – eat this soon, because something has gone grossly awry with some of them in the field, and we fear the same might go down if you don’t use yours sooner than later. Here’s a recipe that could use yours with the tomatoes, oregano, and garlic.
• Garlic
• Onions
• Sweet Peppers
• Zucchini
• Zero Cucumbers
• Tomatoes
• Eggplant

Just three boxes left to go for the year!

A new, terrible predator has been stalking our land. In broad daylight, when no humans are round to witness the carnage, something has been roaming through the high tunnel and destroying our beautiful tomatoes – when they are ripe and ready to harvest, they are devoured, their carcasses often left hanging on the plants. When they’re not quite ripe, the beast takes only a nibble – ruining the entire fruit before moving along in search of sweeter prey.

The single, neat triangular holes left behind in the unripe fruits told me what we were dealing with – a free range chicken had discovered the promised land. We tried chasing them away when we saw crews come clucking around, but the damages continued, and escalated. One particular hen – a ratty little grayish yellow hen, was our main suspect.

A live trap was set for her, baited with the tomatoes already torn asunder. And when we came home from our travels that afternoon, the hen we’d suspected was, indeed, indignantly captured inside of the greenhouse, in a cage full of maters.

I made plans to rehome her – but put her in solitary confinement in the nursery coop for a day first … to see if the problem was solved with her on lockdown.

No.

It was too late. Perhaps she’d been the pioneer, but in the recent days she had taught the others. A dozen more tomatoes fell to their rapacious beaks before sundown.

So, Ratty gets to stay. And today after the harvest was done, I fought the vines that covered up some coils of fencing, so we could create a barrier, in the hope that our vine-ripened tomatoes and our free-range chickens can peacefully coexist once more ….

(that’s it up top, with pieces of thorny vines lying about ^ )

inside box Thirteen

We didn’t expect to be harvesting in the rain today, but the morning brought a whole lot of surprise moisture, making us run out to harvest the cherry tomatoes before the plants sucked up the water and split all the ripe fruits open. And then I got to balance in the rain on a ridiculously unstable ladder surrounded by poison ivy, to harvest the apples for today’s box. And I laughed aloud up there, realizing just how happy I am that this is my life, my work, my struggle. It was a joy to harvest the box today – I hope it tastes as good as it felt.

• Red Baron Apples – the regular rainfalls have made for happy apple trees
• Tomatoes That the Chickens Spared
• Chicken of the Woods – you will get haunted, most likely, if you let this sit in your fridge until they go bad. They’re very, very good! Our friend Mark found this in Interstate Park and traded them for some tomatoes and eggs … anyway, you can find recipes online or just tear or slice them up, then sautee them in butter – cover and simmer in oil/butter for ten minutes, on low. Pairs well with pasta, or risotto, or put it in a soup. Mushroom things.
• Cherry Tomatoes Saved from the Rain
• Cucumbers of the non-pickling kind
• Zucchinis of Tender Size
• Red Potatoes
• Kohlrabi – eat the greens too! Can cook em with your kale perhaps
• Kale
• Shallots
• Parsley
• a Melon of Some Sort or Another

I told you we were teetering toward fall, didn’t I? This week was a wardrobe change week – outfit one begins with flannels and socks and layers, which are shed as the day kicks in and the sun’s heat brings attire back in line with summertimes. I’ve used the van’s heated seat and the AC within hours.

It’s kind of fun. And a gentle introduction to the coming Autumn.

In other news, I mowed. I mean, weeded. Err, cultivated. That’s the official word for it in agriculture. Kristin is watering the beets. Beets are our exercise in baffling futility. This year perpetuates the cycle.

Also, there is a huge chicken of the woods growing just outside our bedroom window. And we picked chokecherries. And

inside box Twelve

• Tomatoes! – now they’re really going! BLTs, salsa, sauce, caprese salads, roast them, or freeze them to enjoy when summer is merely a memory.
  

• Cherry Tomatoes – don’t sleep on these delicious little guys! I harvested them all this morning and ate many that had split, and was quite impressed with their deliciousness.
• Sweet Corn – the last week of it!
• Peppers – either a couple of bell peppers or a bag of shisitos. Either way, not spicy. Shishitos are usually cooked whole over high heat with oil and salt, maybe a little garlic at the end, until the skin starts to blacken and sear.
• a Melon – everyone got one of several possible varieties.
• Carrots
• Cucumbers

• Zucchini
• A red and a white Onion
• Italian Basil

This was the week the season tipped. Various signs abounded, but these were noted as confirmations of what everyone already knew. summer would end. Winter will come.

Yeah, this is the week where you realize that soon it will be harder to put aside thoughts of winter, as we notice that the bracken ferns are crisping, the night times are cooling, the sun setting sooner, and the farmer picking the flowers from the tomato plants.

But for now, summer is still here. Our bones haven’t felt a true chill, the woodstove pipe has smoked only in the first stirrings of firewood-thoughts. The days remain long, long enough that at bedtime it’s hard to believe the morning activities could possibly be from this same day.

The fall crops have yet to kick into our meals, there are more tomatoes still on the vine than we have yet harvested. And biting into the corn releases distilled sweet, sweet summertime.

The heart of summer beats strong still, but now, we know. To appreciate the swelter and the crisp, the blaze and the abundance. Last week, we could not help but to take it for granted, but this week, we are grateful to feel gratitude for the summer, in its endless array of sensations … and flavors.

what’s inside box Eleven

They are getting heavier, and harder to close …

• Holy Basil – to smell it is to love it. Put some in your pocket to waft heavenlyily throughout the day, or however you do aromatic herbs. Tea is common, but if you dry some and smoke it in a pipe please report your results. It’s also said to be good with melons …
• a random Melon – everyone gets one, but they’re all different. Some might be less flavorful that we would like, due to the rain this week. Oh hey I got waxing philosophical and failed a rain report … over 2″ this weekend!! Good for many thinga, but not for melon flavor concentration. Anyway cut yours open – it’s like some kind of musk melon. Cantalopeeque,or maybe not.
• Sweet Corn – eat it soon. As usual, I will endorse immediate, raw consumption as a peak summer pleasure, but if you’re into microwaves and butter and such you do you with no shame. But the sooner the sweeter, sleep not upon it.
• Radishes – the first of the fall crops! Might be quite spicy, unless that rain too off the edge.
• Purple Potatoes – they didn’t do as well as the other types, but at least the nature of our problems with them is an indicator of our soil’s improvement …. it’s less acidic, which makes the skin disorder the purples had more likely as an unfortunate side effect of an overall positive.
• Cucumbers – summer staples
• Zucchini – staples of summer
• Tomatoes
• Cherry Tomatoes
• Onions
• Jalepenos – since they’re a green pepper, the season’s weirdly delayed pepper-ripening matters not.

((Some of summer has been slow to arrive this year – the peppers, the eggplant, and the ground cherries, usually abundant by now, are barely starting to ripen, or even to form. A weird year, as is normal. Too little sunshine is suspected – too many clouds, with smoke and haze all too often.))