Harvest

Another busy season of the year.

Our Dirt grows great taters.

This is my typical Wednesday morning rushed offering for the Header Challenge, go see what the fellas (Dave, Fishing_Guy,  Mac, and Gail’s Man.)  have for you this week for my pick of topic, Harvest (what a surprise from me eh?).  Harvest is a busy time, but I hope it finds you with a few moments to sit and visit with me and a few slightly competitive sports around the world.

Have you noticed how busy times are busy because even though the time or season may have one name it is never about just one thing?

Pickles anyone? Pickling cucumbers. The best? Mc Pick and Pearl

Harvest Season isn’t just about collecting the crops produced and putting them up. 

As if that wasn’t enough,

Evaluating, Calculating

This season has a lot to do with evaluating the year.

A real pretty pumpkin, but not on my list for next year. It's named "One Too Many" but considering how many plants I put in, I'd call it "Five Too Few".

Yeah it’s true that, like most other folk, I run a constant commentary on my life and what I am doing, all year long.  But the fall harvest brings with it a feeling of culmination. And from the culmination you can more clearly see what needs to be seen.  What worked great, what could have worked even better,

A perfectly beautiful squash prematurely harvested by cute little field mice.

what was a bit of a problem and what was a complete and utter disaster and basically made me a laughing stock in the neighborhood and could that have been avoided.  Sometimes me being a laughing stock isn’t avoidable and so it is just best to go with it and get a little chuckle myself and settling in knowing that circumstance will be different in the future and so will the outcome.

Any way that is one big thing that goes along with harvest time that isn’t very harvesty, and it increases the busy-ness of the season unlike the running commentary, because now, if I don’t make note, adjust what I actually can right now, well then, I run the risk of repeat failures or not doing again what did work.

Planting, etc: Doin’ not Just Thinkin’ and Writin’

One of the many other things that makes this season busy that isn’t of harvesty nature… planting.  Gardeners, farmers, livestock folk know that what you do right now has more to do with three to six months to a year or more down the road than it does at this present moment.  It goes beyond planning.  Far beyond just getting out the calendar and planning what to do when and who to contact and where to show up with what.  More that just writing, waxin’ poetically about how the year’s bounty is in and how the store walls groan and the hearth fires burn.

New plowed ground getting marked for beds.

Fall has quite a bit to do with just plain doin’.  Like planting. And…  Building compost bins, bring plants into dormant storage, marking out beds, diggin’ out paths while the soil is just right, liming soils, seeding wildflower beds, restacking wood, washing incubators and hatchers, guttin’ the brooder shed,

October frosts are usually light and infrequent, making it worth protecting crops to extend the harvest.

puttin out remay to get just a little more harvest in,  dumpin old pots, turnin’ stuff upside down so it doesn’t catch water, rollin’ up hose, but not to much hose, movin’ manure.  Oh wait, manure is always movin’.

Decorating

When the decorator in me isn’t out decoratin’ the fields with poo, I’m in the house swappin out the spring/summer decor for fall.  I’m thinkin that for me, spring and summer decor is not really seen as seasonal but just usual stuff, it is out the longest of all my rotating decorations, it is the hardest to put away, and from last season to this season it is the biggest switch over. 

Now my attic is full of holiday boxes. But then, it is a small attic.

Lots gets put away and surfaces are bare, then out comes the beginning of the flurry of decorations that will take us from now until February.  I began my married life with two small boxes of holiday decorations, then along the way it all became too big and too many little boxes so I introduced myself to my “one box a week” holiday decorating system.  It began on Thanksgiving weekend with four boxes, one each for the weeks of Advent.  Back then fall decorations could fit in a drawer in my dining room or collected from the great outdoors to be tossed the day after Thanksgiving.  Soon autumn became a box-necessary season of its own and now it is all incorporated into the long holiday season of us girls decorating the house.    Some things that come out now blend into the Christmas decorations which blend into Valentine decorations and carry us from fall all the way to the middle of winter, when we will finally need to bring in spring, even before she is here. 

Flower picking, a lot like flower harvest eh? Flower-harvest could be one of my favorite harvests to do.

But don’t forget the last of the fresh home flowers.  Fall flowers… I think I am fondest of flowers of the autumn.  Obviously mums, of which I did not grow my usual fare of this year, but the wild aster and the dahlias,

Early morning gathering of cut flowers for the house

and of course the first rose of late spring is so inviting but there is nothing like those last roses to give your heart a lift.  And heart-liftin’ is important, bringing me to…

Partyin’

The final (but most important) thing that adds to my busy-ness, parties!

When you grow food cuz ya like people and wanna feed them, the one thing that is a must do is autumn parties.   And autumn is full of them!  We’ll be taking an abbreviated celebration of the true discoverer of America, Leif Erikson on the road this year all the way up to Justin and Anna’s minus the lutefisk I suppose.  

Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes: Roma, Chocolate Cherry, Stupice, Beaver Lodge Slicer, Heinz, Gills

Then it’s Columbus Day on Monday, time to roll out the meatballs, pasta and garlic bread, with homemade sauce from the tomato harvest.

Great potato harvest this year, looking forward to some yummy meals with these fellas

The Irish girl in me, usually with the help of my very Irish daughter, has got to throw in a little celebration for Saint Brendan, the canoeist from Ireland, who was a bit bored with the monastery one day so he took off for a little adventure with some of his buds.  So bring on the spuds, cabbage and cream and call it Colcannon!

Howden or Socerer pumpkins working on their tan, anybody have a sun lamp with a looong cord?

And of course if like me, you grow punkin’s, even though you didn’t grow that many this year and you’re still too chicken to try a giant punkin’, ya gotta have a Punkin’ Head Day celebration at the end of the month, and invite all your Punkin’ Headed friends and family to join ya.  I have.  There will be ripe punkins to carve. And treats to eat.

A bon fire party! And maybe we'll serve roast duck!

There’ll be a bon fire for sure!  Burning bright and reminding me of what was once said about Dirt’s and my home, what burns in our hearts really.

CC and her autumn colored kittens at the top of the full hay barn!

C.C. and her kittens will see see you soon Dear Reader, thanks for taking the time to visit with me today and note to self, I will never worry about white space in my posts again.  Whew golly!