The acorns have begun falling on the roof of the little house in the big woods. Ploink, ploink.  The sound of mid-August. From my backyard, I can still hear the call of the loons, and hummingbirds are still coming to the feeders. But make no mistake: September is just around the corner. So let us enjoy August while it is here—-the warm, sunny days, the cool evenings, and the songs of crickets and grasshoppers.

From NPR’s the salt: Ever think about who picks your berries? Eliza Barclay’s piece illustrates why you should.

From the Bowdoin Daily Sun: Volunteer night at the Bowdoin Organic Garden.

From Huffington Post: A very funny guide to bad lobster rolls.

From the Portland Press Herald: “Mainers feeding Mainers.” Maine Farmers have begun growing food for the Good Shepherd Food Bank as well as for various food pantries.

And now, some suggestions for everyone who has too much zucchini or, as a substitute, summer squash.

First, from epicurious: Zucchini patties with feta.

Second, from NPR: Three recipes using zucchini.

Another rainy Friday. But the weather forecast promises—I say, promises—to be good this weekend. I sure hope so. There’s lots to do, including making some soup for a friend who recently broke her elbow. I’ll also be helping out at the Dave Mallet concert, which will be at the Winthrop High School Performing Arts Center this Saturday at 7:00 p.m. It’s a benefit concert for the library expansion. In between, I plan to get some bike riding in. Have a terrific weekend!

From the New York Times: Great news for someone like me who loves fruit—it’s really good for you, and the sugar in fruit is not equivalent to the sugar in soft drinks or candy. So eat that fruit!

From NPR’s the salt: “After three months, $330,000 and a high-profile media blitz, the world’s first hamburger grown in a lab made its worldwide debut Monday.” The verdict? “[T]he burger was edible, but not delectable.” A modest suggestion: maybe we should eat mostly vegetarian, with a bit of meat now and again to jazz up our diets.

From Farmers Market Coalition: This is National Farmers Market Week. I don’t have to tell you where to get your local food, do I?

From the Portland Press Herald: As someone who loves pie, I didn’t think it would be possible to improve on this delectable dish. However, Meredith Goad writes about hand pies, a new (yet old) trend popping up in southern Maine. Give me a couple—one for each hand.

From the writer Ben Hewitt: “Fin and Rye have reached the age at which they are eager to prove they are growing into the young men they will become, and there is perhaps no better proof of such a thing than successfully driving a herd of 30 milk cows across a high, green hayfield and down into the barnyard below.” A beautiful piece about time, change, and the rural life.

From Eat Maine Blog: Kathy Kelleher’s review of Small Axe food truck in Portland, Maine.

Another rainy Friday, but at least we had several days of fine weather this week. High summer is here, and I’m hoping for a lot more of that fine weather. In the meantime, today will be a good day to make cinnamon pie knots for a friend who fell while hiking. She’s recovering from surgery, and we both agreed that those pie knots would be just the thing to cheer her up.

From the Bangor Daily News: How Skowhegan became Maine’s breadbasket.

From the New York Times: Too much rain in the South means a very poor crop of fruits and vegetables. This is bad news for all of us who live in the eastern United States.

From the Portland Press Herald: Brunch is one of my favorite meals, and French toast is one of my favorite brunch items. Brooke Dojny gives a recipe not only for Maple French Toast but also for a Mostly Summer Fruit Compote. I could eat both right now.

From NPR’s the salt: Workers at fast food restaurants went on strike last week. Their demands? That they be paid a living wage of $15 an hour. Good luck to them! Every working adult deserves a living wage.

From the blog Craftivist in the Kitchen: Shari might be “from away,” as we Mainers call those who live in Maine but aren’t born here, but her fish chowder is fast becoming legendary in the Brunswick area.

August is here, and at the little house in the big woods, it is a month of promise. So far, it has been a terrible summer with either too much rain or too much heat. However, the past few days have been lovely—hot, dry days and cool evenings—and it has felt as though the end of July was getting ready for August, usually one of the most beautiful months in Maine. My husband, Clif, and I sure hope August will be true to form this year.

Because of the weather, we’ve hardly ridden our bikes, but with the first of August, we are filled with determination—that we will ride most every day and then plan a couple of long treks at the end of the month. We’ll pack our granola bars and our lunch, and off we will go. This year we want to ride around Lake Cobboseecontee, which spans 5 towns—Manchester, Winthrop, Monmouth, West Gardiner, and Monmouth. It’s a long, long lake, but what makes this ride a challenge isn’t the distance but rather the hills. It’s got some big ones, that’s for sure.

We also want to host a couple of gatherings on our patio. Fresh vegetables are coming into their own, and I have plans for grilled zucchini stuffed with feta, fresh thyme, and honey. Our friends Steve and Margy are coming over on Sunday, and we hope to have a leisurely afternoon on the patio, starting with grilled bread and ending with dessert.

Right now in the backyard, the bee balm is in bloom as are the dwarf snap dragons. The flowers are abuzz with insects, some beneficial to the garden—the bees—and some not so beneficial—the Japanese beetles. Hummingbirds whizz from the trees to the feeders, and grasshoppers pop from the flowers to the patio. In my little vegetable patch, there are cucumbers and tomatoes, which I will have with my lunch today as I sit on the patio and read my New Yorker.

Why can’t August last longer?

August is right around the corner, and the crickets and grasshoppers have begun their late summer songs. I love sitting on the patio and being surrounded by those songs. With the swirl of voices, the backyard feels so alive.

However, there is not much time for sitting on the patio today. My husband, Clif, and I are hosting a potluck gathering for some of the people he works with. One of them even offered to bring lobster for lobster rolls. How could I refuse an offer like that?

Soon, I’ll be making potato salad and getting the house ready. It looks as though the weather is going to be good. Could it be that we will actually have one whole day without rain? Maybe so. After all, August is usually one of the loveliest months in Maine. With the way this summer has gone, all bets are off, but I’m hoping this August will be true to form, and we will have hot, dry days and lovely cool nights.

Rain, rain go away. Don’t come back until the gardens dry out. Not too dry, of course. Neither extreme—too dry or too rainy—is desirable. But enough already with the rain. For the first time in the nearly 30 years we’ve lived at the little house in the big woods, our front steps were covered with green mold, and my husband had to scrub them. Here’s hoping that the weekend is warm, but not too hot, and sunny.

From the New York Times: Gary Paul Nabhan writes about drought, climate change, and food shortages. He also lists some commonsense solutions.

From the Kennebec Journal: A piece about the Kneading Conference in Skowhegan, Maine. There’s a real renaissance in grain growing and bread making in Maine, and the conference is a reflection of this.

From the blog treehugger: A description of Ben Greene’s Farmery, an “innovative sustainable agriculture project” where food is grown and sold at the same place. A vision of the future or just another one of those good ideas but…?

From NPR’s the salt: In New York City, doctors in a new program are now proscribing fruits and veggies to overweight patients. Could be the beginning of a promising trend.

From the Portland Press Herald: Anne Mahle’s take on pancakes, with some wonderful suggestions for a berry topping and a syrup. (Ah, pancakes! How I love them!)

From the Guardian: Two excellent pieces that are related. One is about a young mother in England who lived in poverty, had a tiny budget for groceries, and blogged about it. The other is about the rising cost of food. While both feature the United Kingdom, both are relevant to the United States.

Today, I spent the afternoon reading on the patio. It was actually hotter outside than it was inside our home, but on a summer day without rain, I can’t bear being inside. So during the hottest part of the day, I stretched out on two patio chairs and alternately drowsed and read Bee Wilson’s excellent Consider the Fork, a brisk look at how cooking implements have changed through the ages and have thus changed the way we live.

The ice in my iced tea melted down to nothing. The humming birds went from the bee balm, now in bloom, to the feeders. In the woods, crows called, and branches snapped. A grasshopper landed on my foot.

While I was drowsing on the patio, my husband, Clif, and our daughter Dee were at the Maine International Film Festival (MIFF) in Waterville. They have full passes and will be seeing four movies today, which means they started at noon and will return some time around midnight. On such a movie marathon day, someone has to stay with the dog, and that someone is me. I like movies, but not four in a row. Clif and Dee are the true movie buffs. Compared with them, I am a piker who likes no more than two movies in a row, and truth be told, one at a time would be just fine.

The film festival runs until next Sunday, and I’ll get a partial pass, which will allow me to see ten films. During the week, there are “only” three movie slots per day, and this suits the dog’s schedule better than four movie slots. Because of MIFF, I probably won’t be blogging much next week.

Today, before it got really hot, I made a batch of gingersnaps for us to take to the festival next week. We always pack a cooler full of food and drinks to take to MIFF. Better for the budget, and, gingersnaps notwithstanding, better for the waistline. (We also bring fruit and healthy sandwiches.)

However many movies a person sees—10, 20, or, yes, even 30—the Maine International Film Festival is quite an event, one that really perks up Waterville during the summer. There are people on the street, and they talk and argue about the movies they’ve seen. Directors and actors come and give talks about their films.

Coinciding with the film festival, the Colby College Museum of Art will be having a grand opening of its new addition, the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion.

Readers, if you live within driving distance of Waterville, there are lots of reasons to go there this week.

From the Portland Press Herald: Poor children in all of Maine’s counties are getting free summer meals. It’s too bad we need such programs, but since we do, it’s good they are expanding.

From the Grist: Nathanael Johnson takes a look at genetically modified food in an attempt to come up with a reasoned conclusion about the pros and cons.

From Nation of Change: Sarah Grothjan writes about a thriving farmers’ market in Athens, Ohio, which also happens to be one of the poorest counties in the state. Grothjan thus disproves the myth that only affluent communities can have thriving farmers’ markets.

Again from the Portland Press Herald: Jeff Peterson’s recipe for grilled tofu and coconut rice. Sounds delicious, but I would probably marinate the tofu in some kind of garlic, ginger, soy sauce marinade.

From Letters from a Hill Farm: Nothing in particular, just the whole darned blog. Nan writes about food, her farm in northern New England, books, movies, and anything else that strikes her fancy. She had taken a break from the blog, but now she is back, and how good it is to be reading her posts again.

From the New York Times: Going on vacation? Melissa Clark has some suggestions for simple dishes to prepare. Those of us who prefer staycations might even want to try these recipes at home.

Let me come right to the point: So far, it has been a terrible summer. Either it has been so blindingly hot that even I can’t stand it—and I can take a lot of heat—or it has rained so much that I haven’t been able to figure out when to feed the potted plants. I keep waiting for a few sunny days in a row for the soil to dry out at least a little, but those sunny days in a row haven’t happened yet.

Instead we have rain and drizzle followed by more rain and drizzle. On the plus side—the gardens and the potted plants aren’t exactly thriving, but they are holding their own. However, the slugs and the snails positively love this weather, and in all my years of gardening at the little house in the big woods, I have never seen such a slimy onslaught. Each day, I go out with a jar of soapy water and pluck the snails and slugs from my plants. Irises seem to be their perennial of choice, and all those little munching jaws have made ribbons of many of the leaves. I have literally picked hundreds of snails and slugs in the past two weeks, and it gives me no pleasure to kill these creatures that are, after all, just trying to make a living. If only they would make their living in the woods. I would never bother them at all. But when they come into my garden and start ripping through my plants, I have no choice but to go on the offensive. Gardening is not for the faint hearted, that’s for sure.

I am hoping, perhaps vainly, that today the weather will clear at least enough to allow me to have lunch on the patio. I’m not asking for sun, mind you, just no rain. Then as I eat my pita-bread sandwich stuffed with Farmer Kev’s lettuce, raw slivers of his turnip, some of his roasted beets, and a sprinkle of feta, I will hear the whirr of the hummingbirds’ wings and watch these tiny birds come to the feeders filled with sweet water. The nuthatches, chickadees, and finches will fly to the feeder filled with sunflower seeds, and sometimes it will seem as though the forest positively flutters with little wings and darting bodies. Then I will think, how lucky I am to live in such a beautiful place, rain or shine, summer, spring, fall, and even winter, when patio days are just a memory from the past season.

Scenes from the backyard on Thursday, July 11, 2013:

From the New York Times: Let’s face it, whether it’s with sweet or salty treats, even the most dedicated foodie has chinks in his or her healthy-food armor. KJ Dell’Antonia writes a thoughtful piece about going without a junk food for a week.

From NPR’s The Salt: Another reason not to waste food. According to this piece, wasted food also involves wasted water. Lots of water, which is a precious resource.

From the Grist: Some thoughts about guerrilla gardening and the role of humans in the environment.

From the Portland Press Herald: Anne Mahle offers a few strawberry recipes that go beyond shortcake. Not that there’s anything wrong with short cake.

From Time magazine: Should obesity be labeled as a disease? The AMA thinks so, but writer Maia Szalavitz is not so sure.

From the Guardian’s Australia Food Blog : I love Maine’s farmer’s markets, but I must admit to feeling a teensy-weensy bit envious when I see pictures of markets in warmer countries, where, say, freshly-picked pineapples are sold. But Hilary McNevin’s “How to Enjoy a Food Market” has good advice for those who shop at food markets in Maine as well as in Australia.