Welcome

Maybe, like me, you live in Minneapolis, or someplace else in the United States where coffee, cocoa beans, quinoa, and rice don’t grow. Maybe, like me, those are some of your absolute favorite things, and you’re not willing to give them up. Maybe, like me, your spouse has even suggested that giving them up would be detrimental to your marriage. What are you going to do?

Sure, August is the hottest month, but the temperature's got nothing to do with it. For most backyard gardeners, these 31 days are the culmination of 11 months of waiting and wondering and breathlessly anticipating the climax of the entire year. The month of May is but a flirtatious glance, a mere glimpse of possibility, a hint of a romance that may or may not come to fruition. But in August, we experience the panting, sweating, throbbing, uninhibited consummation of a relationship that began a few months back when we pressed a few vegetable seeds or seedlings -- firmly, gently, probingly -- into the fertile earth.