Fall Vibes

Fall vibes are cranked to 11.  A season’s worth of carbon and solar energy has culminated into a bunch of roundish, delicious things. They’ve been reaped, cleaned and stored for the next several months of photosynthetic downtime. The winter squash is picked and artfully stacked in the greenhouse for curing while the onions and garlic are boxed, labeled and oh so orderly stuffed under our garage ping pong table. Hundreds of pounds and over 80 varieties of seeds are almost completely harvested, threshed, screened, winnowed, dehydrated and tucked into 4 gallon buckets where they may live in our entryway for the next several weeks, and proper storage racks for the next several years, awaiting their shipment to another random plot of dirt in the U.S. Potatoes are being dug and stowed away in garbage bins with a bit of wood shavings. Out in the fields, the fall clover, rye, oats and vetch are coming up thick and green (almost looking like we know what we’re doing after so many years of patchy, mistimed cover crop seedings!). The sheep have moved off their summer veggie/cover crop paddocks onto a longer term winter pasture (our uncultivated back acre) so, as the daylight wanes, the fall cover crops can focus their precious energy toward growing leaves and not wool. Firewood is stacked, greenhouses are clearing out and the last of the hanging apples are quickly succumbing to yellowjackets and their ilk. Back inside, the meals are getting a bit less fruity and a bit more rooty as we revel in the season’s first rutabagas, winter radishes and parsnips. The barn is still a chaotic warzone. If it’s lucky, it may enjoy a few fleeting days of organization sometime in the dead of winter when nobody is around to appreciate it.