We are on our second picks of sweet corn and red slicing tomatoes. Everywhere there are full mesh bags packed so tall they could tumble at any time - bags stuffed with perfect Silver King corn, roma beans and green beans, and oh so many Pete’s Sweet onions. We’ve had an incredibly fast turn-around lately in American twenty-something year old help and it makes things complicated. I finally got speakers so that I can listen to music on my computer again and it is so comforting to listen to old music from college as a summer storm strikes and softly rumbles and pours and crickets outside my bedroom balcony doors.

A storm last week pummeled our youngest little planting of tomatoes. Pete wants to take the over-ripe, split cherry tomatoes from where we are currently harvesting, and plop the little open tomatoes into each of the holes where a plant has died. Like little seed bombs. I didn’t know you could do that.

He also recently placed short cups of cheap beer around all the tomatoes we just picked to deter the roaches from sneaking in. Roaches make me cringe and yelp whenever I see them. And I am all for sharing drinks.

I want to watch heat lightning in a spanish moss and willow framed sky from a hopefully alligator-less marsh somewhere near Edisto with my best friend Katie while we laugh about life and our Moms and the stupid things boys do and the stupid ways we respond. That’s where I want to be right now.

The shishito peppers are ripe and I feel like I’ve been waiting a whole year for our pepper extravaganza. We planted 19 varieties and some are finally ready to pick. Arturo Ruiz is the most proud of them. He irrigated and planted and weeded and twined all the peppers at the farm. And they are a beautiful crop and it might as well be from all of the cheerful things he sings loud enough for everyone to hear, unashamedly. All that song is in those peppers I promise you.