Thankfully we got some good rain last two days. After 2.2 inches of rain (I think it was a record for this year) soil is moist and soft like a butter. I had to dig some of this butter after a surgery I did on pumkin vines. I had to cut and open several stems to take out squash vine borers out, nasty white worms which eat plants from the inside. They just chew on it from a bottom up. So after picking bugs I covered open cuts with some soil. Maybe the pumpkins will survive, who knows. I really hope so.

Good thing is that while digging I found some good worms in our soil, those which people use for fishing. This is a sign of a normal life comming back to this land we farm. I found more good worms later while weeding parsley. And there was even more waterworld today, a frog, which stopped while crossing a path dividing cabbage from broccoli. It tried to look dirty to make sure I wouldn’t notice it in the dirt. Maybe it went deer hunting? Or to scare some raccoons?

We are deeply in the harvesting stage. And it might take forever to pick something, or it can take 5 minutes.

When you pick potatoes, you have to exercise a lot. You bend to pull the plant, you kneel to pick the potatoes, than you stand to dig around with the potato fork, to find a red or yellow orb stuck deeper, you kneel to pick it and you bend to pull another plant and so on.

With vine crops there is a lot of break dancing around the vines, which grow in all directions. So what used to look like a neat path in between rows might be hard to find and walk through now. That’s why it is good to have some stretching skills and bones made out of rubber to avoid stepping on the stem and still be able to pick some cucumbers.

Zucchini is a different story though, you can basically load a truck of zucchini and not even pick a half of your small garden patch. My favourite to pick! It grows so fast that even squash bugs get confused and can’t recognize what they tried to damage yesterday, because today it looks twice as big. It’s like to go to sleep in Rhode Island and wake up in Texas.

Bush peas, it’s kneeling all day, like sinners used to do in the Middle Ages. Carrots: quick and easy pull, unless it’s too dry. Then you sell only carrot tops. Beets: fast, beans -sinners like the peas, unless they are pole beans. Tomatoes: small ones take a while, big ones: we will know soon. Bananas: we don’t grow them, yet.

Well, I cut our first cover crop. Using scythe which I bought at an estate sale, for 3 bucks. With a help of our neighbor, who showed up with the same kind of tool, never used before by him.

It wasn’t a brand new tool to be honest, speaking about my own scythe. But I sharpened it, and it even cuts weeds that look like trees.

I am sharpening it every 10 minutes while using it. Grandma Joie said that people used to sharpen them very often. And I don’t blame them. It is a good excuse to take a break, to take it easy. For me it was cutting a small patch, but people used to cut acres with it. At least in Poland in the 19th century.

Men cut the rye, and women picked it and put it together in some kind of standing piles. And they used to sing in the fields, or while transporting the rye on wagons pulled by horses. Songs were about love, sad, and with no happy end.

At least that’s what I read in my literature classes, I don’t know about a real life, but probably similar, maybe the sun was hotter and less singing was heard, but who knows.

One of my favourite scenes in Polishliterature takes place in Lipce, a small village created in a novel The Peasantsby Władysław Reymont.

The main hero, the richest farmer in the village, Maciej Boryna, gets to the end of his days. One day in spring, he wakes up before dawn, an old man in his night gown, and walks around his farm, checking on his horses, cows, and eventually he goes to a field. Something pushes him out there, he can hear some kind of voice, that “it’s time”.

He figured that it is time to sow. So he kneels and grabs a handfull of dirt, like he would have a hand full of seeds, and starts to broadcast it. And he is almost out of senses, but he still has this mythical instinct to sow, to put seeds in the ground.

And the dirt is all gone, but he is still sowing, like the author said, like he would sow himself to those fields of his grandfathers. And than he can hear a voice telling him “stay with us”, and so he stayed.

It was a death of a Farmer.