Homesteading Reflections: Autumn Harvest, Winter Over

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ILLUSTRATION: IGOR FJODOROV/FOTOLIA
With the autumn harvest in, we put up ours stores, winter over, and wait for spring.

Here in our peaceable kingdom there’s never a shortage of things that need doing from March to October. It’s only in the other four months — after the autumn harvest, and while we winter over — that I can relax, reflect, take stock, and plan. We have reached that time.

November/December

As we pull the curtains early after supper to shut out the dark these days, I see the wide old window sills piled high with gourds. They’re all volunteers from the tired gourds we tossed out on the snow last January (Some are bumpy. Those are the ones I like best) and the sight starts me summing up the year’s harvest.

Our vegetable garden did well last summer. We have tomatoes, beets, applesauce, rhubarb, relishes, pickles and jams jarred to last the winter. There’s corn, peas, beans, broccoli, and green soybeans in the freezer. The old dirt-floored root cellar in the basement holds six bushels of potatoes, three bushels of beets, and smaller amounts of carrots, rutabagas, parsnips, and turnips. The potatoes are heaped in the cellar and covered with dirt. The other vegetables are stored in big cans set on the floor. We’ll concentrate on eating the root vegetables while they’re still good and move on to the frozen ones when the beets turn flabby and the carrots start to wobble.

We filled our home freezer long before we ran out of good things that we wanted frozen, so we rented a six cubic foot freezer locker in town for $8.00 a year and keep our extra vegetables and meat there.

  • Published on Jan 1, 1972
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