Glorious summer

The glory of summer, announced by the cacophony of the cicadas, is marked in earnest by the arrival of peach season. This year, the season was delayed at least one week because of an inordinately cool and wet spring but farmers are hoping that this means the season for all late-summer fruits and vegetables will be extended well into September. Here's to hoping!

At our favorite nearby orchard, peach season began on July 15 so my husband and I hopped on the motorcycle and rode over to load up on the first apples of the season, called Lodi apples, and on the first peaches, Early Red Haven.

There is something downright poetical about getting a peach so ripe and fresh that it still has the leaves of the tree attached to it. Since I was a child, I have loved peaches when we could find them in the supermarket in Puerto Rico. But I had no idea that the sad, mangled fruits you get there have little in common with the glorious peaches you get when you live only a few miles away from the orchard. (Of course, because we live here and not there we can't enjoy the wonderful quenepas of late summer there so there's always a trade off.)

The upcoming harvest of apples, which will be a bittersweet sign that we'll be moving into fall, also looks quite promising.

Also in preparation for fall and winter, farmers are already collecting the hay to form it into the bales that will feed livestock when there is nothing else on the ground from them to munch on. These bales are the ones kept outdoors in comparison to the square ones that are usually kept inside barns.

Luckily for us, as we were riding down a country road, we came upon a farmer baling the hay into square bales that will be kept in the barn. While my little digital camera could not take the picture fast enough to catch the bale in the air you can still see the the most recently made bale falling on top of the others in the wagon behind the tractor.

Another promise of the glory of summer is the early corn that is now ready to be picked after a much-delayed growing season. I look forward to buying some fresh corn ears at the market this Saturday and then making corn bisque or a corn mush (I can't eat the actual corn kernels) so we can enjoy another wonderful perk of living in farm country during harvest season.