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I say this every year, but it’s really no wonder that there are so many harvest festivals celebrated around the world. After a season of hard work, having a moment to stop and look around and give thanks and gratitude for abundance, for the land, for stores of food and for the people around you is good. We got to do that this weekend as we always do with some of our best friends and it was lovely to walk around the farm, enjoy it’s bountiful beauty and savour good company. As always when we are with people and peeking at the many beautiful spots on the farm, we fill up again with our love of this place and it’s many wonders. In particular, this fall as we stood on the edge of our new pond we reveled in the good fortune of having a source of fresh water on the farm and gave thanks to the earth.
But as the weeks go by and we gear towards winter, there is also great satisfaction in working at the end of season tasks that wrap up the season and prepare us for winter. In the picture above you can see our 2019 garlic field – last week, we seeded almost 10,000 garlic cloves for next year’s CSA harvest and for seed. We planted and seeded our winter greenhouse crops then moved our moveable greenhouse structures on top of them (see photo below).
Jeff has seeded many acres of cover crops and the fields that will be in crop next year are now covered in lush green oats and peas, tillage radish and rye.
In the coming weeks, we will bring in our main winter crops – potatoes, carrots, beets, cabbages. And we’ll clean up the garden of irrigation supplies, fencing and row cover. It’s a lovely time of year, a time of a slower pace but also of hard work with the reward of a steamy cup of something at the end of the day!
