The Yellow Time of Coasting: Summer Week #15 – 9/11/24

The Yellow Time of Coasting

The farm is like a quilt that we stitch together and unstitch season by season. Crop rotations mean that the patterns change every season. Each year the weather is different, but there is always weather. Each year there are different people working hard to create and undo the quilt, but there are always people. The quilt, however different, always gets made.

As we enter the fall of our 20th season farming, it is hard for me to pull out memories from any one particular quilt. There are so many different sizes, patterns, and orientations as we have grown and evolved over the years. In my mind of memory, it’s one beautiful quilt laid on top of another.

What does emerge for me during each season are distinct times of knowing.

Now is the yellow coasting time. Yellow is everywhere I look. It’s the time of ragweed pollen, perennial wild sunflowers, goldenrod in bloom, school buses back on the roads, the neighboring mono crop soy fields turning to yellow, the driest areas going first, like a map of the water in the soil.

Along with the yellow time is the feeling of coasting. All we do all day long now is harvest. There’s nothing else to seed. Nothing else to transplant. Not much left to weed. No large fields sheets of row cover to shovel on or off. No trellis posts to pound. Gone are the evenings where I spend 40 minutes planning out the complexities of the next day. This time of year, we harvest some crops towards orders, others on a schedule regardless of orders. It’s easy and straightforward. My mind delights in the calmer days.

The other specific part about the coasting time is that we aren’t facing the cold yet. We can enjoy the last bits of heat and start pulling out storage crops (potatoes!) without time pressure. That will change in another 3 weeks when all of the sudden cold rains and cloudy days can threaten our ability to get storage crops out of the ground. But right now, right now that concern is not yet upon us.

Right now, in the yellow time of coasting, field life feels pretty simple. We’re just coasting, one forty pound crate at a time.