Sweet harvest

As soon as the nights dip into the 30s and frost threatens, my brother Henry drops the whole thing and calls all hands to return aid dig up the sweet potatoes.

As I leave my house to reply the decision, I watch a furry woodpecker work away on the already colossal holes he’s made within the lifeless alrightoff the north part of the apartment. They're two or three inches in diameter—significant sufficient so that he can perch on the rim and tip his whole physique up and over the edge and into the gap to search out some delicious grub. In general, though, he is patient, quiet, and still—ready for the worm to make the first transfer, then levering himself in for the kill.

After I take the compact binoculars he seems to look over his shoulder at me—one large eye fearlessly piercing my two assisted ones. Then he turns back to his waiting, and that i to my gazing. He's harvesting too, utilising these final warm days to stock up on meals for iciness—the identical as we're—although he packs it on as physique fat whilst we p.C. It in our freezers, cupboards, basements, and root cellars.

As quickly as I put down the best compact binoculars, my attention shifts from the woodpecker to the impossibly deep blue sky throughout him. E. E. Cummings ought to have been watching at simply such a sky when he wrote of the “blue genuine dream of sky.” This week before the autumn equinox is the time when the air seems clearest, the solar brightest, and the sky bluest. In a couple of days, and for a quick moment, day and night might be evenly balanced. Then the rapid slide to the iciness solstice starts offevolved, with each day getting shorter and every night time longer.

However right now we’re on the wonderful cusp of the seasons, and as I enter Henry’s vegetable fields they show their own equinox, balancing equal parts summer season vegetation (waning) and autumn vegetation (waxing). This week the moon will probably be waxing too, leading up to the full harvest moon. For the farmer, the harvest moon is less a dreamy proposal and extra a simple fact: the full moon nearest the autumn equinox. It rises early within the night, putting off any darkish interval between sunset and moonrise, which intended in years prior that harvesting would proceed by means of moonlight. Even though it may appear romantic to work by way of moonlight, it is simpler and extra sensible to work in the barn beneath electric lights each earlier than daybreak, ordinarily cleansing and braiding garlic, and after sundown, washing vegetables.

During the hours when our spinning planet faces the solar, there are cover vegetation to sow, dry beans and dry corn to harvest and system, dozens and dozens of fifty-pound crates of roots (beets, carrots, turnips, daikon, burdock, parsnips, salsify, potatoes, winter radishes) to dig up and wash, and winter squash and pumpkins to decide on out of the area and load on hayracks.

But in these days all of that work is placed on preserve as we enter the sweet potato patch armed with digging forks, bushel baskets, and wooden crates. The wildly vining plants utterly cover the rich soil, some leaves green, others reddish-red, others brown. We work in pairs. One person makes use of the fork to unearth the potatoes, even as the other man or woman follows alongside on palms and knees to seize the sweet potatoes and put them in a basket or crate.

We work with urgency because hundreds of thousands of kilos of sweet potatoes must get out of the ground before the soil temperature falls beneath 50. The earlier the sweet potatoes are dug and cured, the simpler their taste can be, and the longer they're going to maintain. Candy potatoes are heat-season plants native to the tropics, and so are very sensitive to cold temperatures. The finest chance from delayed digging is the danger of cold, moist soil with a purpose to lead the tubers to quickly decay. What staves off that decay and promotes the development of flavor is getting the potatoes out of the bottom promptly and then curing them.

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