As the autumn leaves begin to turn golden, lemon yellow, scarlet, and purple, swirling around in the wind, I turn inward and reflect upon my favorite harvest of the season.  It’s not the jovial pumpkins, the scarlet sweet peppers, not even the crisp apples; rather, it’s the deeper harvest of the triumph of the strength of Will and the looking forward to the next season to try something new and different in my approach towards land stewardship.  There is a bounty that fills my soul with fortitude, aspiration, and humility at the complexity of Mother Nature and our interactions with her natural systems. 

Every year in spring I have all these wonderful notions that exuberantly pour into actions hurriedly carried out in farm fields or scribbled in farm journals or in the new seeds obtained at seed exchanges in faraway lands yearning to find fertile soil.  From Spring the long journey of soil preparation, planting, transplanting, weeding, trellising, weeding again, harvesting and finally seed cleaning and tallying the bounty from the land. 

I am deeply grateful for all of this.

I am amazed that I have just completed my 30th season of farming and humbled by how much I still have to learn.  It is from this fertile place of humility that I celebrate a great harvest of wisdom to patiently wait through the darkness of winter for a chance to rise again in the sacred dance of interaction with sun, soil, water, and seed that waits in the coming spring.  What new seeds will I be blessed to sow?  What new approaches will I get to try?  What new pests or diseases will emerge?  What new community will gather around seed and soil here at Seven Seeds Farm?  How will I continue to grow and change, shaped by these forces? 

As we all witness the turning of the year that comes with the yellowing of the leaves I want to encourage us all to look within and ponder what the out-breathing of the Earth that is culminating in the brilliant flash of color we see in the turning of the leaves brings us. 

What are you harvesting at this time of year? What are you grateful for? Thank you.

 

Blessings on your family and your gardens.

≈ by Don Tipping