Life’s Harvest

Poppy blossoms

Counting harvests:

I was going to start this month complaining about the weather again, but I’m not going too. Earlier this month, Christie and I watched an episode of Texas Country Reporter. They interviewed a farmer who grows, among other crops, malting barley for a local microbrewery in Texas. He commented that his father had farmed his whole adult life and only had 37 harvests. It got me to thinking about life and our orchard.

 We started this project kind of late in our lives. We were already in our 50s when we decided to do more than just play around with a few trees and bushes on the place. We have already had three or four (depending on how you count) harvests.  We probably will not see 37 harvests. If we are lucky, we may have 20 or so harvests more. That would put me in my 80s and Christie a few years younger.  Unlike most farmers who only harvest once maybe twice a year when things work out, or not at all when they don’t, for us we harvest over the entire summer and into fall. That’s when everything goes according to plan and is mostly because are we grow smaller quantities of many things.

Christie says we are collectors and we always see something else we want to try to grow. That may be true, but we also have a couple of other goals. First, we don’t want to dependent (or stuck) on just one or two fruits. Two, we have always wanted to just grow enough for ourselves and our local community.  

I decided that I am going to revel in every harvest from here on out.  This is especially true when the mother nature throws us a curve ball.

I have decided that no matter what happens here at the orchard I will find the positive side. Unseasonally warm winters mean that I can be outside doing something without having to bundle up as much. Our cold night a few days ago may have froze a lot of our early and mid-season fruit, but it means I can work on projects that keep getting put on the back burner. Heck, we may even go away for a weekend or something crazy like that. Christie pointed out last week that those plants that won’t have fruit this year should really put some healthy growth on, since they won’t putting energy in to making fruit.

The plants that were not blooming or in some cases even out of the ground yet when we hit 20 degrees, should produce this fall. I know that I will enjoy all of this fruit so much more this year. What a wonderful way to go into fall/winter with fresh raspberries.

Here’s to many more harvests!