There are many pleasures on a New Hampshire vegetable-growing farm. One of the best, this farmer must admit, is not the vegetable growing, but the end of the vegetable growing, along in October and November. As our farming friends and colleagues said, way back in March: “It’s a big mountain to climb.”
The growing season sure is a big mountain, and not the kind of mountain that lets you linger at the summit for hours, enjoying the view. It’s more like the kind of mountain where you eat your trail mix lunch standing up, chewing rapidly at the view, and then hurry down the other side so you’re not caught falling over precipices in the dark on the way back down.
But then when you do get back down, in November, you can look up at the summit and sigh happily: “Look! We climbed the mountain! We did it again this year! We made it through another growing season!”
Now is the time when we vegetable farmers can take it a little easy at our tasks. We might roll up four lazy lines of irrigation rather than unrolling the daunting twelve that make up a section in the spring. We might clear dead pepper and tomato plants from one or two greenhouse beds rather than desperately planting entire greenhouses. We might spread only three loads of compost in a day for fall crops, rather than the frantic eight or ten of spring days.
Also, at the end of the season, we might dawdle a bit as we walk our four horses back over to munch on the nice neighbor’s pasture after our little bit of work. We might even feel like making up a poem about the beautiful swinging black tails of the two horses in front, being led by a daughter with a long dark braid swinging in the middle too.
The daughter and I each lead a pair of horses, while my fellow wheels a rickety wheelbarrow ahead, full of carrot and rutabaga tops. The greens are a treat for the horses, but one horse is a little uneasy about the wheelbarrow, shying away when my fellow stops for a breather.
The daughter stops and murmurs reassurances, and encourages her two horses to go closer to sniff the wheelbarrow. They do so, cautiously, and then they chomp! incautiously at the greens, realizing what they are, which nearly knocks over the greens and the rickety wheelbarrow. We all think this is very funny, or most of us do. The two horses I am with think they are being slighted, and paw the ground, wanting greens too.
Finally we get going again, this time with the wheelbarrow behind us, and the horses stopping to look back longingly, which makes us laugh some more. Oh, everything is so much funnier when you are not frantic with vegetables!
At the pasture, the daughter and I let the horses loose, and they go hustling over to the wheelbarrow, which my fellow is unloading from the other side of the fence.
“Oh, aren’t they cute,” we croon, as the four horses pose in various groupings: the two golden Belgians, side by side, munching happily on greens, or the black Percheron and the bay gelding drinking from the pond, though they are not side by side, because they don’t like each other much. But at least they are drinking from the same pond at the same moment, and looking very picturesque to boot.
We sigh, happily, and walk slowly back home. Gee, this is a nice time of year. Gee, that mountain was big. Gee, we’re glad to be down before dark.
Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Nov 16 - Nov 22, 2022