Closing Time, Ray heads home at day’s end…..
It is the time of year take a minute to take a breath, and take a quiet moment to assess what has transpired these past 11 months. Here at the farm a lot of events, chores and long days have gone by for those of us whom agriculture is a way of life and livelihood, and the growing season is even busier still for those of us whom bring young children along for the ride. I think Charles Dickens once wrote that it “was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. And I think that is a very apt description of what the growing season of 2023 represents to us.
We continue to try to adapt our methods and practices within our growing season to the extremes of weather we experience with climate change, and we now accept that this will be our seasonal reality going forward as farmers. The difficulty is planning for it…the inability to understand or predict what will be drought or excessive wetness and flooding. All of agriculture and forestry nationwide is trying to cope and understand our new reality. This past summer we started with a reasonably dry and cool spring that devolved by the end of June into a month and a half of soaking rains and flooding. We lost crops and suffered some damage to infrastructure. The doom and gloom subsided and we had a wonderfully mild and dry(er) fall to harvest and catch up. But frustration ran high during middle of the summer when the incessant rains created mayhem .
On the positive side of the equation there was our crew. They were exceptional mix of youngsters and oldsters whom stepped up to do the jobs that had to be faced, bad weather or good. This may have been our best bunch of folks to date. The retail folks whom put on their muck boots every morning, helped customers and kept things looking good, to the field crew trudging about the fields in their orange rain gear looking more like lobster fisherman than farmers, all the time mustering good humor and working as a team to ease the each other’s burden. I think that I speak for both Anne an myself by saying we never have we been prouder of our crew, our products and our place in the community than this past season.
Next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the sale of Edgewater Farm to Anne and I. Our bodies remind us that it has been at least 50 years of labor, but our minds somehow condense it into only ten fleeting years. It is hard to wrap one’s mind around the idea of a half century of farming this gound when we think about how we did things, what the farm originally looked like and those that came along and spent time with us along journey.
Yet here we are, and continue to be. The community support we have had over the years has made this all possible. This time of year we begin to consider the future spring and summer when we will all get up and do it all over again, with high hopes. So may we close by wishing all of us good health, a good summer and good gardening season, and a happy holiday and winter respite from all of us down here at Edgewater to you and yours.
