Invisible Harvests
Well, here we are! This is my last essay of the 2019 farming season. At the farm, we are draining water lines, cleaning gutters, mulching raised beds, and celebrating our successes. Oh, and we are most definitely sitting by the fire and reading.
At the conclusion of each CSA season, my favorite book to read is a simple spiral notebook which tells a few of the stories of the year. It’s called our Harvest Book. The pages are each devoted to certain crops with the total weight of each harvest recorded. Some pages, like quince, have only one or two entries. Others, like summer squash and green beans, are covered in dates and pounds, page after page. Our Harvest Book starts the year clean, with sharp, crisp corners. By October, it has water stains, and soiled pages – the smudges of nearly a thousand entries.
Once a year, Brad and I sit by the fire, tally the numbers and assess our yields. We reminisce, take notes for changes to next year’s plan, identify successful practices we don’t want to forget and begin to estimate what quantities we might grow next year.
I love reading our yearly Harvest Book because it provides a physical testimony to our otherwise largely invisible work that’s so easily forgotten. This book tells the stories- like a hidden watermark of weather patterns translating into crescendos of full picking buckets. It records the ebb and flow of farming, of buds turning to flowers and fruit and then finally those leaves, glowing in golden hues, carried off by cold winds.
Our Harvest Book is also the story of our season by the numbers. Six hundred and thirty-six pounds of hand-picked green beans, six hundred and twenty-three Delicata squash, six hundred and eighty-nine shares of salad mix, and on and on-- all passing from our hands as seeds, seedlings, ripening plants, harvested produce, then into your hands, to your salad bowls and soup pots and dinner tables. From an invisible dream through fruition, nourishment, and then magically gone again, our work morphs from the tangible to the intangible and back again. If it weren’t for the deep creases in my hands and the weathered peppers plants standing in the field, after a long nap I might ask myself, did it really happen?
Our work this year has translated to 7,314 bunches, heads, and bags of greens, roots, fruits, and herbs, distributed to nearly 70 families. And for the tenth consecutive year, we’ve grown at least 7 tons of first class produce, distributed entirely in our local community. (This year, the total was 10 tons.) Over the last decade? April Joy Farm has provided 110.5 tons of certified organic food to area residents.
I think of all those tons flowing through the farm and then **POOF!** gone like a drift of curious pigs through an open gate.
But our Harvest Book remains like a trail of hoof prints-- a lasting glimpse into this cycle of energy, infused with the spirit, passion and care we are so committed to nurturing. Next year, we’ll start again, with a shiny new Harvest Book. It will have clean white pages and crisp corners -- just waiting to document all those stories to come. But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, another chapter in this Good Food, Grown with Love multi-volume series is just about ‘on the books.’ For now, I’m quite content to sit by the fire and read, dreaming of those harvests-- past and future-- passing through our hands to yours, from our hearts to yours.
Signing off with Joy and Gratitude, Your Farmer April
“…it is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.”