The artemis melons in the hoop house are developing. In just a few days, the size of the melons have grown noticeably. They get to be round, two pound melons. The description from Territorial Seed Company reads:

A French Charentais type, Artemis produces ravishing, rounded globes with silvery white, lightly netted rind that’s ribbed in emerald. The 2 pound fruit have luxuriously sweet, deep orange flesh with a divine bouquet and relatively small seed cavity.

I have the vines growing vertically and am limiting each vine to producing one or two melons. Not too long ago, I watched a show on how the $100 to $400 melons sold in Japanese department stores are grown. They are grown in greenhouses, vertically, and only one melon is allowed to develop on each vine. The ones that end up in lavish, satin-lined boxes with $100 plus price tags, are specially selected, with only one out of a thousand ranked good enough to fetch the eye popping prices. Think I’m making this up?

• Ginza-sembikiya
• 47Club-Crown Melon
• Shigoku-Crown Melon

The dancing poppy blossoms of late July are gone. What was a bed of delightful poppies is now a morgue of wilted poppy plants. It’s time to let them go. Gardening is a meditation in letting go. You want those delightful colors to stay, to tickle you again, but they move on without your permission. It’s as if you don’t matter. They will slip away no matter how hard you try and make them stay.

So let them go. Toss them on the compost pile and move on. Plant something new and watch it slip through your fingers too. That’s life, holding your fingers out and enjoying things as they slip through them. You can’t hold onto anything in the end, but that’s OK.

Tomorrow is market day at Bow Little Market. It’s time to sort the potatoes. This week I’m weighing every potato and sorting them by the ounce. So if you’re coming to Bow Little Market tomorrow, you can buy just the size of potato you wish. How’s that for customer service?

It’s mid August, the coolness of Fall is in the morning air, the stacks of firewood have dried, dry leaves are gathering on the grass, baby melons are swelling, champagne grapes are turning purple.

So much happens outdoors every day, it’s hard to spend time indoors. What am I missing when I’m standing at my desk doing bookwork? What are the chickens up to when I’m in the kitchen cooking? What color are the corn tassels now? Outdoors is where it all happens.