I spent Saturday off the farm attending to personal business. So I leave you with this seasonal post from 2015. Enjoy!
There is a day each year. A day when you find yourself in the kitchen slicing the last of the season’s ripe tomatoes, a moment you have lived before, knew was in the cards. A day when the vines are still heavy with green tomatoes. A shortened day in which those green tomatoes will never fully ripen, destined instead for frying or making chowchow. How did that unstoppable summer deluge become a trickle and then a drought?
So begins fall, a chance to cherish what is passing before the weather turns to ice and snow — both too soon to dream of the fallow winter, when the cold months spoon next to the season of rebirth, that bare season, stark in its absence of greenery, when our native imagination colors in the palette of the riches to come, and too late to partake of the fresh bounty of the summer season just passed. The in-between season.
Fall is the season of salvage, of scouring the fields and paddocks for useful leftovers. In modern parlance, it is the sustainable season. A rush to harvest the last of the fruit to preserve in jams, jellies, chutneys, and wines. A time to take stock with some soul searching of Aesop’s Fables significance: Do we have enough firewood? Did we use our time well last winter, spring, summer in preparation for the next year? It is a time of movement, cattle to new pastures and forage to shelter. A time to glean the excess hens and roosters, butchering for hours to stock the larder for the gumbo and chicken and dumplings that will get us through the cold months to come.
Fall is a time of hog fattening. The cruel reward for an ability to gain 300 pounds in nine months comes with a knife wielded the week after Halloween. The bounty is delivered to us in sides of bacon, salted hams, corned shoulders, butcher’s wife pork chops, hand-seasoned breakfast sausages, headcheese, pates, and bowls of beans with ham hocks.
Fall is also sheep-breeding time. As the days and nights cool, the ram has his pleasurable work cut out for him, making sure all ewes are bred. We, servant-like, make sure the ewes are conditioned for lambing, in good health, hooves trimmed, attending to their every need. Meanwhile, last winter’s lambs are grazing in their own pasture, fattening before they fall under the butcher’s sword in the remaining months of the year.
Fall is the season of coming face to face with imminent and unavoidable death. It is the fever of the dying year, the mumbled words from the patient in the bed trying to get his affairs in order, to make amends. So much to do and so little time.
It is a season of contrasts, when we eat a ripe tomato while composting the vine it grew on, feed a pregnant ewe while fattening for slaughter her year-old offspring, crush grapes and pears while sipping the wine made last year. Past, present, and future are jumbled in this most hopeful season, when we weigh the year to come to see what is left in the balance.
Like a culture that prepares for a future generation, this work is undertaken for a year not yet born.
………………………………………………………………………
Reading this weekend: On Homesickness: A Plea (Donaldson), an odd little beautiful book.
What an appropriate topic for this year. It’s raining again as I type this, as it has been raining most of the summer. Nearly impossible to make round bales for the beef herd or small square bales for horse hay. Silage harvest will be a slogfest through mud, who knows what combining beans and corn will be like.
With all that said, my son and I have discovered 3 wild apple trees on our land that have excellent eating apples. A bit of positive news in this gloomy period of never ending rain.
What a nice ending, to have discovered three wild apple trees. That the land you have been on for so long still holds surprises. BTW I’d trade you some rain for some of our dry season. Not quite a drought here but no rain since mid-august.
I was in East Tennessee over the weekend and can verify how dry it is there. Here in Central Ohio we had done a bit of drying out – enough for the weekend’s 1.3″ rain to soak in without leaving any mud by mid Monday. Now if we can get the VERY late planted crops to mature ahead of snowfall.
18 months of extreme drought for our area. Stronger tree rootstocks and much fewer flimsy vegetables has been my answer. I actually profit from the drought conditions (which will probably stay with us) as the apples get higher in sugar and the leaves stay scab-free.
What a contrast among all of us. 18 months of drought, having been there in 2016, is no fun, Michael.
Clem, at least you didn’t have to make the I-75 trek in rain.
It’s a weird situation. ‘Drought’ here means that the clover and grasses in the walkways are still growing well, but when you try to dig up the potatoes all you encounter around them is dry powder. Seems to be similar down to more than a metre – the last winter rains didn’t fill up the reserves.
I’m guessing that the statisticians will need to revise the drought scale; we’ve been at max warning level for too long now.
All this could easily be reversed; a landscape of grazing, orcharding and gardens near the house would never experience the kind of stress ours does now. Instead, solutions include demonising cattle, taxing CO2 and the ag industry in concert with politics warning people that their water will get more expensive because irrigation is the new black.
Michael,
Good observations. We have friends on a neighboring farm that have aggressively created keylines and swales. Those areas are deep green and rich in forage currently. Our pastures are by and large brown. A reminder to my lazy self to get on with that project on our own land.
Cheers,
Brian
Good to hear; keyline is a great thing, swales…well. Are you going to do keyline tree planting; do you have someone to do the surveying? You have my email in case you need anything.
Thanks.