By Zoë Bradbury
September 23, 2008
I have been swallowed by September – enveloped in the folds of peak harvest. The heirloom tomatoes are on. The cabbage is ripe and huge and gorgeous. The leeks are fat. The corn is ready. The sunflowers are nodding under the weight of their own seed. The sun is still shining. The mornings are cold. Last week I had a record strawberry harvest. The autumn equinox is here. This is like no other time of the year.
There are lots of days in the week when I wonder at the logic of selling all this food – running around six days a week to water it, weed it, harvest it, wash it and run it to town – when I could just preserve it all and hunker in for the winter, money poor and richly fed. All the potatoes went to market. All the cabbages will, too. I laugh to imagine the irony of going to the grocery store in January and picking over some banged up spuds that were shipped in from Idaho. Sigh.
Someday, when the debts are all paid off and I have a walk-in cooler or a root cellar, things will look different. There will be homegrown farm food for the whole winter, besides just the jars of tomato sauce and jam and salsa that are rapidly putting a sag in the pantry shelves. And I suppose even this year we won’t make out too badly: There’s always our stalwart kale, leeks and Brussels sprouts holding their ground out in the field all winter. They deserve medals.
But besides putting food in mason jars and the freezer (albacore tuna, lamb, tomatoes, strawberries, and huckleberries so far), I am obsessed with cover crops. September is the month that all of my summer cover crops are going under the blade and my fall/winter cover crops are getting planted. The summer stand of buckwheat made me swoon – three acres of lime green lusciousness, chest high, topped with white flowers, roaring with the sound of bees and happy pollinators. That is the reason I love to farm.
I was reluctant to knock it down, but I harnessed up the horses a few weeks ago and crimped it all flat with the cultipacker in order to prevent it from going to seed and to make way for the next round of fall/winter cover crops that I’m planting this week. Buckwheat is an incredible cover crop: It’s quick to germinate, it outcompetes weeds, it’s drought tolerant, it mines phosphorous and makes it available to subsequent crops, it blooms profusely for pollinators, it’s easy to knock down and incorporate, and it’s beautiful. Hard to beat.
It’s been a wonderful month for working the horses in harness. We’ve been hitched up twice a week and covering a lot of ground with the disc as we incorporate buckwheat biomass into the fields. Maude and Barney are becoming a more and more integral part of the farm as the season goes on – and despite it being the month when I feel my tiredness all the way to the bone – I am already excited about our next season together.
I suppose that’s a good sign that I’m on the right path.
P.S. To all my patient readers – I am getting married in a couple short weeks and there’s a good chance that between harvest and cover cropping and wedding organization, I won’t be writing again till after October 4th. Thanks for sticking with me, as sporadic as the dispatches sometimes have been during the peak of the season. Cheers and happy equinox – Zoë.
Zoë Bradbury is a Kellogg Food & Society Policy Fellow. She lives, writes, and farms on Oregon’s southern coast.
