what are YOU doing?

I had walked back to the barn to refill my water bottle when a CSA member stopped me. “What are you doing?” she said. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the end of the farm season and what in general lays in store for me in the next year, so at first I was taken aback by the right-to-the-pointness of her question. Until I realized she was speaking shorthand for: “What is keeping you farmhands busy, now that my share of the veggies is getting so darned small?”

Specifically, we try to get around to weeding the fall crop of spinach. There are four or five rows of it, much of which has been weeded by various people over the last few weeks. The rest of it struggles against the pigweed and errant grasses. Both competitors have been slowed by the shorter, cooler days, but the weeds have a definite Darwinian advantage. The project is mentioned just about every day on the list of urgent to-dos.

We try to get around to weeding the strawberries once more before we tuck them in for winter. There are so. many. rows. of. strawberries. Yesterday, my co-weeder and I set out there for the day’s last hour-and-a-half of work. I couldn’t say if it was a coincidence, but I was immediately blinded by a white-knuckle headache and had to go sit in the darkness of the barn for the rest of the afternoon.

We try to get around to weeding the blueberries. Haven’t been within spitting distance of them in months.

We dig potatoes. Saturday last, we hauled in 1,600 pounds of the suckers. They are plucked from the soil and dropped into buckets, which are emptied into tan crates, which are loaded (by two people) into the truck, which delivers them back to the barn, where they are stacked in a cool, dark corner, where they will sit and stew until they are distributed to CSA members in the next eight pick-ups. (If any of them suffer blinding headaches, they are well-positioned.)

More philosophically, we try to get used to the idea of not being around anymore. We patch together plans for the winter. We watch the crows and the hawks, the creep of fall colors, the comings and goings of familiar faces, and we wonder how many more visits we’ll have.