Lugnasa Harvest Moon
Palisade, Colorado has had a bumper peach harvest. There is a small area on the Western Slope that has an ideal peach growing microclimate. They have other crops, too: lavender, apples, sweet corn, strawberries and vegetables. The newspapers have carried photo spreads of workers in the orchards with peach baskets gently picking and placing the delicate fruit into baskets. Back in Andover, this time of year, the honey harvest would be in, the raspberries just beginning. I would be out planting garlic and pulling the last plantings of carrots, beets, leeks and onions. This is the peak harvest season, when the land and its workers combine to feed millions, even billions of people.
Sitting up here on Shadow Mountain, with a heavy mist slowly creeping down the face of Black Mountain, the harvest season has little sway. A few folks have gardens, true, but there is no large commercial agriculture. The cattle company that raises grass fed beef, for example, has five cows, four angus and one hereford, grazing in a mountain meadow about half way down Shadow Mountain.
Being so far removed from farms and large truck gardens feels strange to this former Midwestern lifer. No more so than in this long harvest season. Corn pickers and combines have begun to roll through fields. The state fairs have swept up 4-H’er raised cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens. The vegetable harvest has peaked. Self pick apple orchards have hayrides and cider stations set out. Not there, though.
In the mountains this season sees the first glints of gold across the evergreen forests of lodgepole pine. The aspen begin to turn. The nights cool down. Canadian blue skies dominate our days.
Labor Day does mark the winding down of one season long harvest up here: tourist dollars from Denver folks. July and August are the heaviest tourist months for our favorite mountain town, Evergreen. We’re not a winter tourist destination, at least not like the ski resorts, so the roads will have less traffic and fewer visitors in Evergreen’s restaurants.
Soon it will be time to start splitting the logs I cut last fall in the first round of fire mitigation. Takes about a year for pine to season. The remaining logs in the back will be seasoned next spring. Log splitting is a seasonal activity both here and in the Midwest. Looking forward to it.
