July
It’s 5:30 AM on a Friday in mid-July. It is daylight
outside, the sun has been up for over an hour now and so have the chickens. I
wake to CBC radio coming through the trailers ceiling speakers. A small pot on
the stove boils water for cowboy-style coffee. Derek is grilling eggs and
sausage to be placed between two halves of a toasted bagel. Thanks to his
absolute need for something meaty and greasy to get through the morning, I’ll
also get one. Otherwise I would likely just eat a granola bar on my way to the
garden. We complete our animal chores and meet Jen in the Garden by 6:15 AM to
receive our marching orders. We start with the first harvest of the carrots;
we’ve eagerly been waiting for them to be ready. The first few weeks of harvest
have been nothing but the leafy greens of early summer, radishes and salad
turnips. I’m eager to pick something I would buy at farmers market. Radishes
are not my thing. Our anticipation turns to frustration as it’s discovered that
the carrots, though beautiful, are encased in thick soil that is mostly clay
and cannot be pulled easily. The carrots must be dug up with a digging fork,
but not too close lest we stab our precious vegetable and ruin it. So every
group of a half-dozen bright orange roots comes up in a block 5lbs heavy of
black, wet soil. Any attempts to pull carrots not fully extracted with the
forks ends up with a snapped vegetable, its bottom half sticking up at me from
the hole in the dirt, like its taunting me. Jen wants 35 bunches for Market
tomorrow. We slog through; the work
feels unbearably slow considering there are 4 people working at it. In the time
it takes us to get the carrots, Jen has completed harvesting 35 heads of
lettuce, 8 pounds of broccoli and is mid-way through the cauliflower patch.
Leafy greens next, we head to the kale, swiss
chard, spinach and bok choy patches to pick the happiest looking leaves they have to offer.
Sweatshirts are discarded and hung on fence posts as the temperature starts to
climb. Salad turnips and the last of the radish planting come out of the ground
much easier than the carrots. We take the harvest to the barn by the wheel
barrow. One lucky apprentice gets the hose and sets up the wash station.
Another heads to the field to bring Sparkle in for milking. About this time,
the sun has come up over the mountains and into the valley and it’s dry enough
to grab a 5-gallon bucket and head into the pea patch. Until this point,
harvest has been moving quickly, stubborn carrots notwithstanding, but once
we’re in the pea patch, it slows to a crawl. And I do mean crawl. On hands and
knees, we make our way through the heavy vines, doing our best to pick quickly
yet selectively. There are sugar-snap peas, so sweet and delicious eaten whole,
which must be not be picked unless full, but not too swollen, lest they become
starchy and tough. Then the darker shelling peas, like candy once removed from
their casing, which can look deceptively full and yield only a few tiny peas if
picked too soon. And then the incredibly big and flat avalanche snow peas,
tasty raw, but especially delicious when sautéed with butter and garlic or in a
stir-fry. Eventually the apprentices washing vegetables and the one milking the
cow join us in the patch, but even so, it will be lunch before we’ll be done.
Backs sore, buckets loaded. Beneath our feet is a carpet of weeds, and they
will fill our day tomorrow.
August
It’s 5:45 AM on a Tuesday in mid August. Derek and I slam
back some form of breakfast, likely a bowl of instant oatmeal or a toasted
bagel with egg. It’s light outside, but not the eager brightness of our July
harvest mornings. Today is a CSA harvest day, which means we are picking for
the customers who have pre-paid the farm for a weekly bag of fresh produce.
Some also receive farm-fresh eggs with their share. The nice thing about CSA
harvests is there is a finite amount of produce to pick, as Jen has already
planned what each share will receive. The tough part is we are on a deadline.
Our harvest must be picked, washed, weighed, and packed before lunch. By now,
we are a well-oiled machine in the garden and the stress of meeting this
deadline is significantly less than we began 8 weeks earlier. Jen sends us
again into the carrots first, it still takes a long time and there is often a
curse shouted at the snap of a carrot or elastic, but we have found ways to
make it more efficient so that it takes two people half the time it took four
of us back in July. We are into the third planting of lettuce now, swiss chard
and kale are still growing strong, but the bok choy, spinach, and yukina savoy
are done. Turnips and radishes have also finished, but in their place beets of
gold, pink and purple add beautiful colour to our shares and market table. Early onions have arrived just as the green
onions are waning. The brassicas are also doing great: cabbage, broccoli,
cauliflower and kohlrabi have all taken their turns in the CSA and appear every
week at the Market. Cucumbers, zucchini, patty pan squash and even cherry
tomatoes are just starting to come on, we are excited that we now have enough
for the CSA. Basil and parsley are booming. We had breathed a sigh of relief
when the peas were declared “finished” and the tractor tilled the spent vines
into the dirt. But no sooner had we rinsed our buckets and stretched out our
backs than we were sent to the bean patch and the fun started all over again. In
the relentless heat of August, the green and yellow bush beans came on as hard
as the peas and twice as fast. In the pea patch, you sometimes could sit
perched on the back edge of your bucket, using it as a stool and leave a
convenient opening between your legs to deposit the harvested pods, but with
beans, no such luxury. You can stand and bend at the waste, crawl on hands and
knees, or scoot along on your butt. And just like the peas, it can take the
rest of the morning and an hour after lunch in the baking sun to get the whole
patch picked. The potatoes have been the
hardest hit this year. An infestation of Colorado potato beetles started slow
in July, and despite hours on our knees almost daily crushing the damn things,
they have multiplied in just a few weeks to devastating levels. Our yields are
¼ of what they should be. So though we have enough for the CSA to get a couple
of pounds, and some for the house, there isn’t nearly the amount we’d hoped
for. Still, the heat has given everything else in the garden a boost, and we
too feel buoyed up by the bounty we’ve harvested in just a few short hours;
excited to share it with the CSA members. We spend the rest of the day picking
litres of raspberries for the house.
September
It’s 5:55 AM on a Friday in early September. The sky outside
the trailer is the dusty dark blue of a half-realized dawn. We eat our oatmeal
in bites between pulling on layers of clothing; the portable heater is whirring
on the counter. It’s 5 degrees outside.
We fill our travel mugs with coffee or hot chocolate and complete our
morning chores as quickly as possible, careful not to get sprayed by the hose
when filling the chicken waterers: the damp will keep you chilled until break
at 10:00 AM. It’s probably past our 6:15 AM start time when we get into the garden;
it’s so much harder to move quickly without the sun cheering you on. We leave the carrots for the CSA, same with
the potatoes. The last planting of lettuce is not quite ready; everything has
slowed down since the temperature dipped a week ago. We pick chard, sweet and
cooking onions, cauliflower, and beets. I’m on leek duty, 10 bunches, and its slow
thanks to heavy soil and elastics snapping against numb fingers. The zucchini,
cucumber and patty pans must wait until the temperature has risen a little and
dew has dried to be picked. Jen tells us we’ll start next week’s harvest at
7:00 AM so that we won’t have to break up harvest, a very welcome announcement.
The late fall turnips have their first picking. A few bunches of parsley are
put together. They don’t sell well, but they still look nice next to the cash
box at market. We grab about 4 lbs of
garlic from the racks drying in the bottom of the barn. Then we all head for
the green house to harvest tomatoes. The cherry tomatoes have slowed down some,
but we still get about 10 lbs of them. The really boomer right now is the
heirloom tomoatoes. Pink beauties, green zebras, black krim, red beefsteak, and
bright orange valencias fill our crates, an incredible display of colour. We’ll
take over 50 lbs to market. We are done harvest by break-time, and around that
time the sun finally breaks over the mountains into the valley and we can hang
up our sweaters till evening comes.
