Bronte and I walk the older flock down to the lowest pasture. I lean hard on the corner post of the moveable fence driving it deep into the earth, wrap the black tie around both sides of fencing, and knot. After making sure the tub is full of clean water we head back uphill, stopping at the greenhouse. I step inside and inhale the warm, moist air. Tomato vines spiral round the baling twine connected to the ceiling. There is fruit of all sizes in here; cherries, like round, red ornaments, dangle precariously while the heirloom giants, grapefruit in size, pull their plant almost to the ground. I take my black bucket and fill it immediately.
The fine hairs on the plants reap havoc with my skin. I pick and scratch.
Stepping out, the cool air blows across my face and I stand, enjoying bucolia watching the sheep graze.
Next to the greenhouse sits the mobile garden. This season the wagon is filled with cucumbers, basil and green peppers. We’ve put a cross-hatched bamboo trellis through the middle of the cukes and they hang, chubby green popsicles, waiting to be picked. Stripping the basil plants for pesto only serves to make them grow faster and, because we are able to have the peppers in the warm afternoon sun via the mobile garden, we have sturdy green ones playing hide and seek among the basil leaves. I take stalks of basil, eating some, several cucumbers and a large pepper and add them to my bucket.
When I reach the main garden I push open the metal gate. Bronte slides past me hoping to find an errant ground hog. I push aside leaf coverage to find skinny green beans swinging: I’m careful not to pull too hard so as not to break the stem. At the end of that row, rogue pumpkins lie hiding in the grass, attached to their umbilical chords. Long snakes with big orange heads. I smile because I love getting produce that I didn’t plant and I love Halloween.
I spy the end of a zucchini under a leaf the size of an elephant’s ear. Moving carefully, I’m able to pull it up. It is the weight of a newborn baby. A bit further away squat two acorn squash and a green butternut.
Even though we have been experiencing this for years, there is a sense of wonder in the bounty. The idea that we stirred our manure into this soil, knelt and carefully placed mote seeds, mounding some, creating manure moats. Watering, waiting, then filling our buckets with food is rather incredulous.
This is the time of the harvest, a time to not only reap what we have sown but to bow back down to that same earth from which we pulled carrots and feel gratitude as deep as these roots.
Paul and I spend Saturday evening shredding zucchini for loaves of bread, adding a pinch of cardamom and folding in grated orange peel. We simmer all of the tomatoes together in a big stainless pot, periodically using our long wooden spoon to stir everything together. We are witches concocting a brew. Jars full of pickles, both sweet and dill, are stacked on a dish towel on the counter. To the hot tomatoes we add fresh basil, chopped Music garlic, tiny sweet onions, oregano, marjoram and a big handful of parmesan cheese. Now we have sauce, hot tomato sauce, thick and red like blood, that gets poured into clean jars. Later everything will join their cousins, the raspberries, in our freezers in the basement. We will stand at the open door, look at the array of sizes, shapes and colors and feel mighty.
We know that this winter we will light a candle as the wind blows at our kitchen window, pour sauce over pasta, spoon shredded zucchini and garlic onto our plates mopping it all up with a slice of bread and will taste summer once again. It is an amazing gift, wrapped in a green bow.
I’ve walked up Magic road a million times. At any one time I have had three border collies, now just one at my heel. I started this journey with my lead ewe, Mrs. Chubbers and now her daughter, Daisy, with her mother’s same broad pelvis, walks ahead of me to the field. In the barn are three four-month-old Shetland wether lambs, like full size wool sheep who have shrunk in the dryer. Our latest farm problem to solve is how to incorporate them into the larger flock.
Hens squawk like car alarms as among them run our young Wyandotte chicks: black, like crows speckled with white paint. What they lack in bulk, they make up for in speed as they quickly dart under the chicken coop to avoid a reprimanding peck.
Standing, vegetables in the bucket at my feet, I feel a tired ache in the familiar but am also able to be grateful for and aware of the harvest that has risen from this earth. Like these plants, our roots go deep. Here too is where we are planted.