
Harvest season has been a long haul this year. I have had a hard time keeping up with everything, from the influx of fresh food, to the realizations that we need to move on to bigger and better things. The crux of our business is from the two greenhouses Rob and a friend took on as well as a small acreage at a different site. The reality of trying to balance home life, Rob’s full time job, the vision for our property, the gardening projects offsite and other (numerous) commitments we both have outside the house has been trying at times. At times it has been overwhelming! I have never resented abundance before and feel embarrassment over the feeling. The bushels and bushels…and bushels of food kept appearing, and along with them the commitment of work needed to preserve the food, and as the days ticked by the smell of rot crept in as we failed to keep up with it all…not to mention our impressive crop of fruit flies!
Rob is amazing at getting things done…especially when it comes to processing food. He is often the one coaxing me out of my reading chair in the evening to process this or that. As a result of nearly two months of work (salsa, salsa verde, a variety of soups, dried tomatoes, fruit leathers, fermented tomato sauce, fermented beets, stewed tomatoes, watermelon jerky, sauerkraut, fermented hot pepper sauce, dried pears and apples) I believe that tonight will be the last night of this very long haul! We are left with cucumbers to turn into a fermented relish and a few more watermelons to dry into jerky. Mind you, our back porch is covered with squash and pumpkins that will need attention, but not for a while yet. We have some space before we have to deal with them. I see it as time to recover from the marathon this has been!
I am excited that this day signals the ending of a very difficult chapter in our life. A chapter where we were required to keep going despite the protests…from our children, our bodies, our minds and our hearts. It is time for us to pull in our roots. As a plant prepares for winter, we too shall bring back our extended selves. It is time for us to recuperate. It is time to start enjoying the abundance of our harvest. We have such a high yield! And we have certainly gained more than just edibles this year. While reflecting on this past few months, it is hard to miss the fact that it was not the processing of food that was actually causing us stress. At the edges of the stress, we realized that it was that the food preservation had to be squished in around all the other things. The stress came when it couldn’t be the focus we needed it to be.
We have learned so much from the past few months. We set out in the Spring with the goal of figuring out what it is that we wanted to do with ourselves. Our plan was to have one crazy year to try things out and see what came of it all. We wanted to gain clarity about what we wanted to do with our lives. How did we envision our future? What were our real goals? We aimed to hone in on our holistic goal. After a lot of hard lessons, what we want to do is now clear. We want to be homesteaders living debt-free. We are not sure just how this will manifest, but more than ever we are eager to find as many ways as possible to integrate all the parts of our lives. What this year has taught us is the true value of integrating, not segregating. We want to be farming our own land, producing our own food, and using our energy and creativity for our own goals. As we wind down the busyness, slowly pulling inward, we have the opportunity to hunker down, turn inside and to each other to begin visioning how we make our dream a reality.