Way back in snowy January, one of our ideas for this summer was to begin work on a Green Hope Farm cookbook, taking photos of every meal we cooked with produce from the gardens. This would be a bizarre and supremely dull cookbook if based on this summer because…… yes…….the stove is still broken. I now know where Mark, the lovely Sears man, grew up, who his high school friends were and what he did on the fourth of July, but none of this has helped with the F5 error on the stove.

So as we enter day 37 of our stove free life, we eat a lot of fruit and vegetable salads and grill everything else. Then at least once a week when the Sears man has come and we have convinced ourselves the stove is finally fixed, I celebrate by trying to bake something- This week it was a big blueberry cake from our blueberry patch. Ten minutes into its cooking time when the F5 error began again, I had to take the cake out of the beeping, rapidly cooling, still broken oven and drive it to town to someone else’s oven.

It’s been a hot summer so who am I kidding that if the oven had been working I would have been slaving over a hot stove to prepare fancy dishes for photo shoots? There would not have been enough time for this project anyways as we have to spend so much time carting our fans from room to room.

I have come to think of the end of the work day as the “Migration of the Fans” as we all leave the office in a herd, each one of us trailing the cord of our favorite fan to our next location.

For the under thirty set this means moving the fan to their location for yoga, “Zumba” (a cardio workout that seems to mix Cambodian hip hop with salsa dancing) or some other insanely hot activity while for me it means dragging my fan to the kitchen for a serious bout of head scratching about a new way to eat raw broccoli.

Then when the raw bar is ready, our fans come together to keep us cool while we chew and chew and chew. Last night was a small moment of victory when William admitted he had grown fond of tomatoes. Funny how a steady diet of raw broccoli stalks can make a formerly loathed vegetable into a new friend.

Outside there is no break from dragging things around since we now need to move sprinklers from garden to garden to keep things from wilting away in this heat. But as you can see from the photos, many Flowers are loving this heat and they cheer us on to just sit back with our fans blowing and enjoy this unusually hot New Hampshire summer. So with a raw fennel stalk in one hand and a raw carrot in the other, I am doing my best to let go and think how impressive my carbon footprint is this summer.