There is nothing like a couple of rainstorms to set everything right. Here it is Saturday afternoon and I am sitting in the shade of the one tree in my vegetable garden. There is a breeze and I am watching a pair of goldfinches going after my first blooming sunflower. I am trying to psych myself into believing it doesn’t get much better than this.

Thank goodness it rained because the generator that powers the well here at the garden picked this week to go on the blink. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

Because I’m at one of those rare moments with nothing to say, I thought I would put this column on a clipboard and wander around pencil in hand. For the past several weeks, I have whined about weeds, bugs, drought and heat so I’ll give you all a break this week.

A couple of weeks back, I decided to free all the seedlings still in the bondage of plastic trays and six-packs. I stomped some weeds flat, covered them in hay and sprinkled a bit of compost in piles. I literally flopped the seedlings up and out of the flats. They are actually blooming in little square piles and have settled into a pleasing fashion. Good thing no one from landscape architect school stops by.

Some unknown person dropped a couple of loads of woodchips near my big compost. I know they will need several years to decompose so I have been ignoring them all summer. Yesterday my friend and cohort Marie and I began moving wheelbarrows full of them into the paths between the raised beds. My son, Reuben, weed whacked them as the weeds were obliterating access to those beds. We figured the chips would hold down the weeds for a while and perhaps decompose quicker. We must have drunk a couple of gallons of water. It was way too hot and humid for such a task.

We ate our first corn, Golden Bantam. It was so tiny after removing the corn worms that one needed five or six ears. No matter, it was delicious and made us happy.

The early Jersey Wakefield cabbage is a big success. We only gave it one dose of BT for the white cabbage moth early on and were not bothered again by the pest.

There are finally some eggplants, peppers and tomatoes! It seems like real summer when those foods become abundant.

Why is it that cucumbers and zucchini are too small to pick and the next day can be used for doorstops? Good thing I have chickens who love them.

For the first time in years I have grown soybeans. Now I guess we call them edamame. My friend Sharlee and I grew them in the seventies. We spent an entire day cooking and shelling them. We pressure-canned them in little half-pints. We each got three or four tiny jars for all the effort. This year I’m cooking in the shell and making the guests shell their own. I have learned something in 30 years finally!

The big news this week was the brouhaha over the 1984 video of Shirley Sherrod speaking to the NAACP about her learning a humble lesson in race relations. Mr. Breitbart, a right wing blogger, took it out of context and tried to make her comments the moral equivalent of segregation, lynchings, Jim Crow and slavery. Shame on him. Ms. Sherrod’s father was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan!