Autumnal Reflections

I’m not sure how it happened, but here we are at the Autumn Equinox! Somehow I blinked and I’ve been here at Hungry World Farm for 4 months!? Despite the summer-like temperatures that have persisted, I’ve been seeing the seasons slowly shifting. The contents of the market garden is moving more back towards cool season crops, my evening work hours are getting a little harder to complete now that its getting dark earlier, the bright green of the trees is getting singed with orange and yellow. It’s beautiful to watch, but also bittersweet.

Autumn is always a small struggle for me. I LOVE the summer season; the warmth, the growth, the vibrancy of the world…and with the return of fall, it means that time is ending. The colors on the trees are beautiful, the fall season activities are and nostalgic, and the cooler temperatures can be a nice reprieve from the stifling heat of summer. And yet I can’t help but harbor a sense of growing dread for the approaching cold, dark and dreary winter months.

But! I try to find ways each year to counter the looming dread and sadness that summer is ending, with things that help me be in the present, and enjoy the time I still have with life teaming around me. Things are still growing! Despite the general seasonal shift towards “going to sleep” for the colder months, we are still planting! In the past few weeks, we’ve transitioned the high tunnel from being jam packed with 8-12’+ tomatoes, peppers and the biggest basil plants I’ve ever seen, to being 7 beds of lettuces, kale and carrots, and let me tell you…after months of helping to care for those plants, it hurt my heart to see them get cut down! The high tunnel has been one of my favorite places to walk through, to really be surrounded and immersed in the beauty of growth and abundance. But when I feel sad about the big, showy produce plants meeting their annual end, I look to the plot of cool season crops that was sown back in the end of July and in August. It’s been a joy to watch those beds of greens, carrots, beets and turnips grow into big, lush, bushy rows of life. It’s helped remind me that winter is, in fact, NOT here yet, and there’s still so much time to enjoy and appreciate this land and what it can still do.

I’m also being reminded, by the garden, that sometimes its good to move on. I’ve been learning about the practice deadheading flowers, which if you aren’t familiar, is essentially cutting off any spent flower heads, so that the plant can put energy into producing more flowers, or pushing the already present buds into bloom, and prolonging the plants’ production period. I’ve been doing a lot of deadheading, mostly on zinnias and rudbeckia. Sometimes deadheading hurts my heart a little, since we’re only keeping the nicest of blooms (to potentially be used for bouquets for the farmers market), I often am cutting off flowers that are only a tad past their prime, but are otherwise still very beautiful! (Sometimes I take a few back to my apartment so I can enjoy them in a vase for a few more days!) There was a time a few weeks back, when I was struggling to accept a certain personal loss, and I was grateful to my work hours in the garden, where I could work alone and be surrounded by flowers as I was feeling grief and sadness. Deadheading flowers was the perfect activity at that time, because the heartache at cutting off beautiful flower heads felt akin to my own heartache I was feeling… but I knew that the action of cutting flowers was beneficial to the plants; being rid of what is no longer needed, even if it was beautiful for a time. I knew that eventually, what was hurting my heart then would end up being something that would only lead to more growth of my own.

One of the things I wanted out of doing a farming internship, was to try something that might be more life-giving than what my 9-5 job in the city was. I wasn’t entirely sure what that would mean, but I wanted to explore. Since today is the official calendar transition to fall, and the mark of my 19th week of my internship, I’m feeling reflective. I’ve learned so much in these past 4ish months. I’ve explored the woods off-path, I’ve grown some of my own produce in the resident garden patch, I’ve foraged food from the land that I’ve never had before, I’ve (almost) completed my Permaculture Design course, I’ve made some new friends, I’ve learned about soil health and caring for tomatoes, I’ve learned about weed control, irrigation systems, and have gotten a taste of what it takes to operate a profitable farm, I’ve learned about canning and preserving. I get to spend my work hours outside among the bees and butterflies as I cut flowers, or being brushed by basil as I prune tomato plants. I’ve gone out to check on my garden plot, and end up stuffing my pockets with green beans to eat for dinner. My fridge is FULL with produce from this land, things that I’ve helped to grow! And I’ve realized that this is indeed what I wanted when I said I wanted “life giving”. My body may be sore, my fingernails full of dirt, and my tan lines obvious, and yet I’m still feeling rested. I think this season of work and learning has also been a sabbatical of sorts.

I’ve got about one month left here at Hungry World Farm. It somehow feels like a long time, and a really short time simultaneously. We’ve only got one more official harvest left next week, and I’m going to miss the team and the weekly project of bringing in what has been growing. But I will try to be present, and appreciate the beauty of Fall around me, the people I’ve met here, and all this open, quiet space, before I head back to the city next month. Happy Autumn!