It's harvest season on the farmers' markets are packed. Hooray! Hey, where did all the eggs go?

Last week, for the first time this year, I ran out of eggs before the farmer's market closed.

One of the sad things about being in the free-range egg business is that the seasonal peak in egg production (April and May) is horrendously mismatched with the seasonal peak in farmer's market customers (August and September).

This is a hard problem without a very good solution. (Telling people that they should buy a whole fryer instead of eggs, because a chicken is nothing but an experienced egg, doesn't work!) It's made even more difficult because demand slackens after September, and it's hard to engineer a two-month egg peak in the wrong season.

So it works out the same as always: get to the market early for the best selection. You snooze, you lose. That's true of everything, not just my eggs.