Putting the Farm to Sleep

August is the month for this Wisconsin vegetable farmer when sleep becomes the most elusive. Our growing season begins in early February as we fire up our greenhouses and begin filling them with all those plants we hope to nurture to maturity. Our start is gentle, one planted miracle at a time, and then it builds momentum through the spring, later adding field work into the schedule, then greenhouse, field work, weeding and finally greenhouse, field, weeding, harvest, delivery. This schedule persists through late spring, summer and finally by Harvest Moon our lives are a blur of activity with day and night stretching into one. August and September are the harvest months, the phase when all of our time, love and tenderness come to fruition. And so we run, figuratively and literally, from one task to the next, always pushing, for this is make or break. These are the moments that allow us to survive the other end of the season, the hibernation.

We are not on this journey through the season alone though; our farm, this land with its plants, animals and the very soil we tread also follow a similar path. The awakening begins with those first warm end-of-February days, when the sun has returned to strength and begins to warm the surface of the earth. Signs show up everywhere, in a blade of grass peeking through the brown, the running of the maple sap, that smell we all crave so desperately of fresh earth, of rain. Then with explosions of emerald green, and those warm summer days that last forever.

Or not. Eventually, in such subtle ways, fall begins to creep in, usually sometime in August with a night or two cooler than a person expects. So begins our farm’s transition back to those months of rest and then deep hibernation.

Sleep, that most precious of commodities; its roll in a healthy life is paramount. We sleep to rebuild our bodies and to clear our minds so that we are ready to receive all that is new the next day. Our farm, our earth works in the same way, though with a different definition of time. For our farm, a year is a day: spring is morning, summer mid-morning, fall mid-afternoon and winter is night. As fall approaches we begin to prep our farm for the slumber to come. We till under our crops as they begin to die, we add cover crop seed, plant our garlic, dig our tubers, mulch. Field by field and row by row we add minerals and compost to feed all the life teaming in a spoonful of dirt. Finally the heavy frosts and short sunlight hours cool the earth, and life begins to move very slowly and finally, for those brief few months, it sleeps.

This is where we find ourselves now. Though this year has certainly been different from others in the past, we still find ourselves at the edge of fall. In a week and certainly not more than two weeks, our field work will be complete and our farm will enter sleep mode. So will this farmer, I will retreat to the house, return to the kitchen, continue my studies on how to be a better farmer. I will analyze the past year, prepare a new plan, ogle the new seed catalogs as they fill my mailbox, and of course find time for some glorious nights of sleep.