Meryl LaTronica, Farm Manager at Powisset Farm in Dover, shares with PRK what they’re up to now that the busy summer CSA season has wound down.

Here’s a farmer in love with her work.

Farm "fireworks" (photo: courtesy of Powisset Farm)

Meryl LaTronica, Guest Contributor
Powisset Farm

Another season put to bed.

This morning I drove slowly down the farm road from my house to our office. Between the two farm buildings, on either side of the gravel road our fields were waking up, quietly melting the frost off the now-dead plants. The weekend snow was only visible in the shady corners of the farm.

At our morning meeting, we lingered in the warm office before making our way out to the fields to harvest the remaining potatoes from the cold, muddy soil. It’s clear that the farm season is winding down as the summer harvests are beginning to fade from our memories.

The work we are doing now is considered, ‘putting the farm to bed.’ It is the act of tucking in the fields for their winter rest.

Much of this work is the harvesting. Over the next month we will be picking the remaining hearty crops from the fields for our winter CSA and winter markets. We will store root crops in boxes, damp with dark soil, and make towers of turnips and beets either in the cooler or our “hay house,” a homemade root cellar.

In the places where there are no more crops to be picked in the fields, we are planting “cover crops” such as oats, peas, rye, clover and hairy vetch. These crops hold the soil down through the stormy winters, cutting back on the erosion and loss of top soil that can happen when the wind and rain whips through the fields. They also contribute organic material when we incorporate their roots and greens back into the soil in the spring. Some of the roots of these crops even pull nitrogen from deep in the ground, making it more available for our spring and summer crops to grab and digest in the next season.

We fill buckets of seeds and step into soft soil in a row, synchronized in our steps. Like fireworks, handfuls of seed explode in the air and scatter onto the earth. We fold the seeds into the moist soil with our tractor and walk away satisfied. Goodnight, field. We move on to the next one.

It’s a bittersweet feeling to say goodnight to the season. There is part of me that is sad to see another season end, tomato vines becoming earth again, pepper plants looking like skeletons waiting for a night of trick-or-treating. The work of the season becomes visible only in our memories, not to our eyes. The year ends as it began: empty fields that are now cover-cropped and resting. But the sad goodbye only lasts a minute, as I am mostly full of pride, satisfaction and joy knowing that we reached our goal of growing delicious vegetables for our CSA, markets and donations.