So do you know what happens to mostly ripe tomatoes when you get 3-4 inches of rain all at once? They split. This means you have to pick a whole lot of tomatoes all at once. Which we've been doing, almost every day for a week. We're a little overwhelmed, but in a good way. We've made sauce, salsa, salads, and on Labor Day weekend we're going to cold smoke some tomatoes and mozzarella just to mix things up a bit.

Look how pretty they are! We stand around and admire them like new parents. I think no matter how many years we grow tomatoes I'm not sure I'll ever get tired of looking at big fat sexy tomatoes. The Smudges are especially striking:

The rain has stopped for now, and though it split lots of tomatoes, and gave us all a bit of PTSD remembering the Monsoons of the Ides of March, the garden certainly needed it. The cucumbers are like great bloated monsters - they've grown over the fence and into the trees.

We also picked our first green cabbage. The cabbages haven't really looked 100% lovely, and didn't seem to head all that well, so we didn't have huge hopes for this guy. But when we picked it, Jeremy took it into the kitchen to chop it in half to make a cole slaw, and then came right back outside holding the half-cabbage over his head like a torch. We thought for sure we were going to see a writhing colony of some sort of disgusting bug, but nope:

We got a really gorgeous, dense head of cabbage. SO nice. Jeremy made an awesome slaw out of it that night, and now we're anxious to pick the other heads, and curious to see if the purple ones look as good.

We've been picking cucumbers, radishes, green onions, and hot peppers...the bell peppers are coming slower, but they are coming. We didn't have much luck with germination on those - we ended up buying some plants from Russel's Garden Center in Wayland. They've done well for us, and the hot peppers are going crazy - the Joe Long Cayennes? They're not kidding...these things are over a foot long:

Green beans are also coming in, though definitely not in the quantity we had expected. We went with a bush style bean this year, and I think from now on I'll be sticking with our tried and true Fortex pole beans. We were picking beans off them until almost November last year, and with only 6 plants we had enough to freeze for the entire house. So, I stuck 15 of those plants in the ground about a month ago - with luck, we'll get some towards the end of September and can use them for our freezing stash. Our soybeans are also ready to pick - there are SO many of them, at least one serving of edamame per plant. Summer squash? FAIL. Tons of flowers, one measly squash that shriveled up and died with the rain. The one squash we planted this year that flourished was an accident - a squash born of compost.

In honour of the Loving Local: Celebrating the Flavors of Massachusetts Blog-a-thon, I wanted to blog about the Belmont Farmer's Market, with lots of pictures of the lush stands and smiling vendors. As it turns out, I was simply not coordinated enough to take pictures of the market while juggling my bag, the baby in the sling, and trying to remember what it was that I was there to buy. I'm also a little shy about snapping pictures of people and their produce, and felt stupid saying "HEY CAN I BLOG ABOUT YOU?!?!" So I failed at that, but what I will tell you is that I bought a lemon cuke from The Farm School, apples and onions and kale from Hutchins Farm, cilantro from Flats Mentor Farms, and some roasted red pepper hummus and pita bread from Samira's . Cully devoured the hummus, I found him eating it with his fingers later on that day. Good stuff. I try to always make the rounds and buy a little here, a little there, and spread the wealth through all the vendors...though these days I have very few vegetables to actually buy, since we're getting so many from our garden. I've picked up something from every place - bread, cheese, pasta, black bean salsa, soda...the farmer's market is one stop shopping for everything. If you haven't been yet, please go. And you know, maybe consider donating to the Mass Farmer's Market. Because they do deserve it, really.