Harvesting Backwards

We thinned our carrots in the last sunny stretch of August. Hank came out to the garden, wiped muck off a carrot with his sweatshirt and took a bite. That’s hard to beat! You guys been munching on these all day? He crunched. 

I haven’t even tried one yet, Kaia laughed. 

What do you mean you haven’t tried one? Hank pulled another and wiped off the dirt. Here, eat it.

We’re saving them! 

What the hell for? They don’t get any better than this. 

Kaia ate a fresh carrot and agreed it was, in fact, delicious. Late that night as we packed the baby carrots in jars for pickling, we snacked on costco tomatoes instead of our own fresh veggies. As we approached the possible arrival of the cranes, we all operated with the unspoken pressure of storing as much as we possibly could. 

Now we eat carrots in huge quantities. When we realize we need something for dinner that’s not in our pantry or house freezers, we don our rain coats and headlamps and trek across the slushy meadow to the root cellar to grocery shop. We dig them out of the cold damp sawdust by headlamp and then take them home and cut off the growing black spots. We’ll slice them up and add them to a skillet of deer fat with frozen greens and garlic scapes. It’s delicious, but it also makes our carrot conservation five months ago feel ridiculous.  

Six out of our original ten garbage cans of carrots packed in sawdust remain in the root cellar, as well as half our beets. In our jar cabin, across the creek, the shelves are still barely visible. Each of our seven freezers barely half emptied. 

There are at least 87 reasons and mistakes and question marks to point to why our calculated food volumes are out of wack. But there’s also an irony in the way we’ve laid out the project. By spending the sunlit summer focused on winter stores, we ate store bought cabbage while we blanched and froze our fresh garden greens. We made sandwiches with turkey leftovers from events in town while running the smoker of fresh coho. Though our lives and diets have been completely shaped by the seasons, we’ve put hours and hours into eating our food in the most inopportune months.

Excess food is a sweet bonus. We drop off halibut fillets in friends' freezers and bring dishes to potlucks. It's a sweet part to our educational mission. We've added "169 quarts of salmon stock is, in fact, un-necessary for winter survival" to the long list of things we've learned. We didn’t know what we’re doing but we did it anyway. The hilarity and humility gained from our backwards harvest is worth every one of the black spots on our carrots. 

What’s new on the website? I’ve added August to the “Month by Month” section, as well as added highlights from our food inventory in “The Food Itself”.