You will notice that the gardening magazines skip straight from June to October. There is a reason for that. By the second week of August the tomato vines have gone leggy and yellow at the ankles, the squash has powdery mildew, something has eaten the beans, and the whole plot has the look of a room after a long party. Ours does too. We are telling you this out loud because every August somebody writes to us convinced they have failed, and they have not failed. They have simply arrived at the part of the year nobody photographs.
The old farmers called this stretch the Dog Days, and they did not mean it as a complaint. They meant it as a description of what a person is capable of in this heat, which is not much, and should not be. A garden runs on six seasons, and at least one of them is the season where you stop. You do not owe August a beautiful garden. You owe it water in the evening, shade for whatever is wilting, and the discipline to sit down before you are finished, which is harder than weeding.
So this is the whole letter. Go out early, do the two jobs that actually matter, and then quit. Sit on the step with something cold and let the tomatoes ripen without your supervision. They have been doing it without help for a very long time. And this afternoon, out in California, a handful of our tomato people are gathered around a table doing exactly that, which strikes us as the correct way to spend a Sunday in August.
P.S. Derylin's rule for August is that if a plant is going to die, it will die whether or not you stand over it worrying. She is right, and it took Tim two summers to admit it.
