In the last two weeks of our harvesting season, my fellow farmer and I are always heaving things around: first heaving ourselves out of bed at 4:45 a.m., then heaving around 40 lb bags of carrots or crates of rutabagas and daikon radishes.
But once the CSA season is over, all the heaving we do is heaving a sigh of relief. Now we are in our easy-going time, our clean-up time, our odds and ends time.
1. The first easy-going project is an irrigation task. All summer and fall we'd been wishing our irrigation line for the fall carrots was in better shape. Carrots are slow to germinate, and want to be moist for three weeks before they poke their green heads up.
When we ran the irrigation, half of the bed that had nice red sprinklers got watered, and half of the bed that had yukky red sprinklers didn't. Thus I had several five-gallon buckets at the far end of the garden, and every time we irrigated I would take off the end cap of one irrigation line and fill the buckets. Then I would dip out a yogurt container full and water down the track where the carrots had been sown. Did the carrots germinate? Yes. Was this an efficient use of a farmer's time? No.
One morning after harvest was over, my fellow and I spent four hours replacing the yukky red sprinklers with the nice red sprinklers. We untangled lines, found enough good sprinklers, found the special tool to make the holes in the line to plug in the sprinklers, and got the line all fixed before realizing the line was way too long.
But we were in no hurry; we did it all over again to the right length. We also had to reorganize the piles of irrigation lines, after tossing everything around trying to find the right stuff. Now our piles are tidy and our carrot line is ready for another year.
2. The second easy-going project is for Thanksgiving. My sisters and I divide up making the Thanksgiving dishes, and my little family of three is responsible for mashed potatoes, winter squash, creamed onions, pumpkin pie, and gluten-free dressing.
“Wow,” I said, by the third sort-of-easy-going day in the kitchen. “This is a lot of work. I don't know how my mother ever got a whole Thanksgiving meal together by herself.”
My daughter, who was making the pumpkin pie, said, “Did you count the four hours freezing the last of the spinach? Did you count the nine hours baking all the seconds and not quite ripe squash, and then adding maple syrup and cooking them down more so they would taste better?”
“Did you count sorting through all the boxes of onions to get the littlest ones for the creamed onions, and peeling the celeriac that were too tiny to give out to CSA members? It takes a long time to peel this celeriac. And you don't get much when you do,” added my celeriac-peeling fellow.
“Oh, yeah!” I said, relieved that I wasn't completely failing my mother, and that I have two sisters with families that were also busily cooking and baking. Plus I was relieved that Thanksgiving happens in the easy-going, clean-up, odds and ends season.
3. The third easy-going project: we are shoveling dirt from underneath one of our vegetable tables to fill in the holes in front of the tables and in front of the woodshed. Where did all these holes come from?
This is what our daughter said over the summer when she was visiting, kindly helping us on harvest day and marveling as we stumbled into the holes: “Isn't this the definition of comedy? You watch the dog dig holes. You don't fill in the holes. Then you fall in the holes.”
Oh ha ha ha! Everything seems funnier in easy-going, clean-up odds and ends season.
Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Dec 10 - Dec 16, 2025