One of the pale yellow sunflowers, early August.
There's a moment every August where the farm is doing two seasons at once. The summer beds are climbing toward their peak (zinnias fattening, the first Shock-o-lat sunflowers throwing that impossible mahogany-and-gold color), and at the same time, we're on our knees planting the things that won't matter until October. It's the busiest kind of quiet.
Here's where we are this week.
The zinnias almost broke our hearts
The zinnias and calendula are about a week out from peak bloom. You can feel it coming: the buds are fat, the first flowers are cracking open, and any day now the whole bed will go off at once.
But a few of the zinnias came down with a blight. If you've grown zinnias, you know the look: leaves speckling with brown and gray spots, the spots spreading and merging, leaves crisping from the bottom up. Warm, wet weather is its perfect storm, and we handed it exactly that.
We had a decision to make. The easy answer is a chemical fungicide. We went the other way and sprayed a beneficial bacteria, a Bacillus-based biological that colonizes the leaf surface and outcompetes the fungus for space and food, instead of poisoning it. It's gentler on the pollinators and the soil life we're trying to build. Is it working? Honestly, it's too soon to say. We'll tell you in the next issue whether it turned the corner or whether we lost the bed. That's the deal we've made with these notes: the real version, not the highlight reel.
What the rain had to do with it
The weather this stretch was nearly perfect, except for one storm that dumped 4.5 inches of rain on us in a single go. That's a season's worth of trouble in an afternoon.
Rain like that isn't just about standing water. It's the leaf wetness that follows, hours and hours of it, that gives fungal spores the window they need to germinate and take hold. The blight didn't come from nowhere; we set the table for it. Our whole corner of New Hampshire has run wet this summer, and early August around here tends to stay in that cool, rainy pattern before it dries out mid-month.
The bicolor that's stopping traffic
The good news is loud and yellow. Our Shock-o-lat sunflowers are open: golden petals brushed with deep mahogany at the base, dark chocolate centers. They're the flower everyone stops for. Alongside them we're cutting white and salmon zinnias, cosmos, calendula, ammi, feverfew, goldenrod, and (Aujan's favorite this year) yarrow. When the goldenrod shows up, you know the season is starting to tip.
Pink yarrow above the grid.
Getting ready for fall
Early August is the hinge. If you want to harvest anything in the fall, it goes in the ground now, so this week we did the least glamorous, most important work of the year.
We planted for fall: two varieties of pumpkins and a late succession of edible sunflowers. In Zone 5b, our first frost lands around September 26, so everything gets counted backward from that date.
We changed beds over from summer growth. As summer annuals finish, the temptation is to rip everything out and leave the bed bare until spring. Don't. Here's our short method:
Cut, don't rip. Chop spent plants at the base and leave the roots to break down in place, especially anything that fixed nitrogen. Less soil disturbance means healthier soil.
Top-dress with compost. Lay it on the surface and let the worms do the tilling. You keep the soil structure and all the fungal networks intact.
Never leave soil bare. Bare ground in fall erodes in the rain, leaches its nutrients, and grows a spring's worth of weeds.
We cover-cropped the second field. The bigger project is the field we're prepping for next season. We sowed mustard and crimson clover across the whole thing, not to cut, but to feed the ground:
Crimson clover is a legume that pulls nitrogen from the air and fixes it into the soil through a partnership with root bacteria. It's fertilizer we don't have to buy.
Mustard grows fast and smothers weeds, and as it decomposes it releases natural compounds that suppress soil-borne diseases and pests, a biofumigant. After a blight year, that felt like exactly the right thing to put in the ground.
In spring we'll mow both down and turn them under as green manure, and that field will wake up next year richer than it is today.
In the cart this week
Zinnias, white and salmon
Sunflowers, Shock-o-lat
Cosmos, calendula, ammi, feverfew, goldenrod
Yarrow and yellow coneflowers
If you've grown through a blight
We'd genuinely love to hear it. Reply to the newsletter and tell us what worked (biological, cultural, or just "pull it and start over"). We're learning this in real time, and the best lessons so far have come from readers.
And if these notes are worth something to you, forward them to a friend who'd enjoy following along. Three referrals earns a free Hardy Hill sticker, and it's the best way to help this little farm find its people.
Hardy Hill Farms · 100 Hardy Hill Rd, Roxbury, NH 03455 · hardyhillfarms.com