Talbot's heat still owns August. The garden calendar has already turned.

Pick tomatoes, peppers, and beans as they come. Leaving ripe fruit on the vine through a Shore thunderstorm is how you get splits. If you never put in a fall bed, the market will sell you the greens — kale, chard, the first spinach — while your own seed still has time to go in as nights drop.

The St. Michaels Saturday market is the cheat sheet: whatever the 60-mile growers brought is what is actually ripe. Easton's Harrison Street market does the same job year-round. Skip the trucked-in July tomato in a December grocery bin. Cook what the lot is holding this week. That is the whole section, in one paragraph.