We had our first frost last week and this week we have been tucking everything back in for winter. Hoses are wound and hung, garden tools have been brought back from where they’d been scattered and a crazy reality that snow will soon bury everything has begun to set in. I feel very much like a busy squirrel during these days, getting ready to hunker down.
But man, we worked this year! Most memorable is that we got a pressure canner, and we put it to work. The kids were equally excited about this step forward in food preservation and had high hopes of preserving a new Groves record for food preserved. And we hit the mark.
This year was definitely a leap forward in our home production. We are twelve years in, living this lifestyle, and some years it has been hard to measure the ground gained. Sometimes the hard lessons learned feel like steps backwards. But all of it adds up, and then every few years it seems we have made huge progress. And we have! But it was actual years in the making.
But I do think our leap in production this year is due to a few things:
1) Our kids are very helpful ages. Elsie and Ivar are like two extra adults around here now. They’re just 12 and 13, but they are as competent and able as their parents. That is a wonder when I think of all the days we spent playing pretend while trying to pass the long days of winter when they were little. But here we are. And everyone else is growing more helpful too. Alden is growing into a great worker. Hattie is more eager to bring out treats to keep everyone else happy. Elias is full of good humor and Abel keeps us patient.
2) We’ve been at this for a while. We have honed our gardening skills now for fourteen years, learning so much every year, always trying something new, expanding our garden a few different times. Now it seems, we simply get to glean from those years of trial and error. (We will always be learning and course-correcting! It’s the nature of this many-variables life.)
3) The pressure canner. We got the big one, so adding to our pantry by 14 quarts at a time felt very motivating and worth the afternoon we put into harvesting, cleaning, cutting, sterilizing and finally, canning. And to our great relief, we LOVE our canned carrots. They are so good.
Here are a few pics we took over the harvest:
We blanched and froze a ton of broccoli this year. Ready for cheesy broccoli soup all winter long.
And Elsie dried countless bundles of herbs. I thought her chair set up here was pretty clever for a portable way to hang everything to dry.
I found Hattie wearing a lifejacket while picking blueberries one morning. Safety first! I suppose it was a very wet spring.
Every year something grows big and abundant and I think it is God making sure we press on. This year he gave us an incredible garlic harvest.
And it’s always more fun to work with friends. We had friends come to harvest our onions, and later more friends come to help us braid them to hang in the basement. (But I didn’t take pictures, apparently…)
We got hundreds of apples off of the front two trees on our driveway. Our orchard apples weren’t as quality- it seems the birds were happy to enjoy the harvest. But those two front trees were astonishing. I think they’re 7 years old, and we have an entire fridge packed with gorgeous, juicy Liberty apples.
Fruit. I think it’s my favorite thing to grow, and could be grown in every single yard in America- apple trees, pear trees, blueberry bushes, raspberry canes. I’ve said for years, “rip out your decorative hedge and put in blueberry bushes!” I’ll keep saying it for the rest of my life.
And I’ll leave you with the one picture I found with me included in the harvest. I am always present, but I am also the photographer! But this one Hattie took, and she happened to catch the moment I realized I had been kneeling in an ant hill. In this moment I had ants in my pants, biting me all the while. This happened to me two times this season, but at least we got the moment photographed! Ha!
But it’s always worth the discomforts because now we will feast! All of that food has been put up, some frozen, dried, canned, put in our “root cellar”…but it all came from our farm. And that true joy and will keep us living this agrarian life for the rest of our days.
