Newsletter – 3 October, 2013

 I am not sure I have ever written something directly positive about the weather before. Sure, I have offered the occasional grudging admission that the weather could have been worse. But that usually just meant that even with the flash floods and hail and gale force winds, at least we did not have a tornado. That hardly counts as a compliment. But it would be small-minded of me, despite our troubled past, to fail to acknowledge what a bang up job the weather has done these past few weeks. 

I cannot claim to understand what the weather is up to. It may well have some deeper nefarious purpose I am not privileged to understand yet. There is certainly a good chance we will pay for this somehow, some day. Or maybe we already did. Perhaps the weather actually feels a tinge of guilt about what it did to us at the beginning of the summer, sees now that it got carried away, and is offering up these glorious fall days as a peace offering.

Though why the weather would suddenly feel the need to make peace with us I don’t know. Perhaps, unlike the Republican Party, it has come to accept that we can actually affect it as profoundly as it can affect us and is seeking detente before it is too late. We should be so lucky. Or maybe like some Hollywood character, it has always had a core of decency.  It has just been misunderstood, hidden its better impulses behind a show of toughness because it fears intimacy or wanted to fit in with the bad boys or maybe it just had a rough childhood. Or else it is just on vacation, worn out by all that hard work making our lives miserable, and its soft-hearted cousin is filling in for a while. 

As always, it is almost certainly best, however, not to ask too many questions. The weather does not appreciate interrogation, and you don’t really want to irritate the weather. Maybe the weather has provided all this warmth and sunshine as a gesture of good will. Maybe it is setting us up. But right now, who cares. This is the best autumn we have had for years, and autumn is the best season by far. Spring has its moment. It also has its mud. Winter offers some compensation–those perfectly clear cold days, the way the snow and bare trees transform the landscape, the sun shining on an icy forest–but not nearly enough. And summer just makes the weeds grow.

Autumn is a particularly good season to be a farmer. The temperature is amenable to outdoor work. The scenery is lovely. You have a huge array of crops available for harvest, and with the cool nights they are far more willing to wait for you to pick them. The seeding and transplanting is all done. I sowed the last bit of arugula, dill and radishes a couple of weeks ago. There’s a lot less to weed. We have cleared out the onion and winter squash patches and seeded them with winter rye. Most of the summer squash rows have been plowed and prepared for garlic. The kale is mulched. The carrot rows are clean. And what weeds are left grow much slower now, removing the sense of fighting a hopeless defensive war that engulfs one in late July. The flea beetles have gone. I don’t know where they go. I wish they would just stay wherever it is. They won’t. But for now we can grow things like radishes and arugula without having to seal them tightly beneath bug mesh. The only really destructive pests left on the farm are the deer, who by this point in the year are willing to eat almost any crop, and a woodchuck that set up house in the pumpkin patch. 

Even with all those advantages, autumn can be made miserable by the weather when it chooses. If it rains enough this late in the year the ground never really dries up. The sun’s too weak, the temperature too low. You can spend weeks slogging through cold mud, waiting each morning for the crops to thaw, the wind-driven sleet soaking right through your clothes and carrying off all warmth until fingers stop working and the water from the hose feels soothingly warm. It’s hard to appreciate the folliage–if any leaves have managed to cling to the trees–when you can’t stop shivering.

And for most of the past ten or so autumns, the weather has indeed chosen to taken away the joy. It feels like you are being cheated. You have done all that work for all those months so that you can enjoy wandering around the neat fields bathed in cool sunshine, picking this or that, pausing to stare at the hillsides, watch the skeins of geese honk past, listen to bees buzzing round the hedgerow asters, or just daydream. It is your chance to slow down a bit and enjoy working on a farm. Who would begrudge you that? Apparently, many years the weather would. But not this year, at least not yet. So we are making the most of it, daydreaming as much as possible.