Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Autumn colours




Once again the sun is slowly disappearing behind the poplar trees across the field, a ball of fire surrounded by slate grey sky, reminder of the forest fires to the north of us. All afternoon it smelled of smoke. 

Another week has gone by without rain, and all around swathers and combines have been running until late into the night. Most farmers are finished with their harvest, or at least getting close. Here and there golden swaths of straw are waiting to be picked up and rolled into big round bales, or – more rarely now – pressed into small square ones. The air is hazy with dust, and today with smoke as well.

Dust also rises with every vehicle passing by on the gravel road running by our house, settling on the lilac hedge, almost in full autumn splendour. Interestingly, some lilac bushes have turned a brilliant yellow while others are of a deep brick red, although I believe they are generally of the same variety. The Mongolian Cherries, small decorative bushes with delicate lance shaped leaves, were the first to change colour in the hedgerow shielding the garden from the road. Like the still stolidly dark green sour cherry trees will do later they display a beautiful apricot and gold hue. 


On the other side of the driveway the three Amur Maples demand attention. The little wings stretching out from their seeds were the first to blush deeply while the foliage was pretending it was still summer, but now the leaves, too, have given in, glowing from fiery scarlet to deep cardinal red. The pouring-out of colour doesn’t stop until I’m almost at the front door: right beside the deck on the west side of the house the Engelman Ivy catches my eye as soon as I step outside. This tough little climber has delighted me all season, ever since Carl brought it home in May. Unlike the Virginia Creeper, its larger-leafed cousin, it doesn’t need any guidance to find its way up a fence or a post: its tiny tentacles insert themselves into the smallest crevice in the wood. Now, it so generously spreads its warm glow in a leafy pool on the rocks beside the pond, its vines with their fingered leaves like flames licking up the balustrade. 




The sun almost gone, I pick up the pail of 'neckless' onions I couldn't gather up in bunches and tie with twine. That's what I worked on during the last hour: the four neat rows of onions I had laid out a few days ago to let their papery skin toughen up and dry so that they keep are hanging in the pig barn, now only a pig barn in name: for more than fifteen years not a pig has set foot in it, and it is used for storage. 

Such satisfying work, harvesting. Without haste I gather ten onions at a time in my left hand, stripping off loose outer leaves, often revealing the next layer of beautiful burnt orange in the process. The stems are wilted for the most part, but tough enough to hold the weight of the onions when I wrap the twine around them and make a tight knot. They will keep. Year after year I vow to plant one less bag of onion sets next spring, and year after year I forget, finding myself with three nets with 100 bulbs each - in theory: there are always at least 120. This year they grew well, without disease, and while we have used a lot in the last two months there are still 232 left today - enough to last us through the winter, I'm sure. 

I turn over the wheelbarrow, in the unlikely case it rains overnight, and look back at the onion field, now empty except for some discarded skins. Leo has risen as well from his spot on the lawn where he watched what I was doing. It is time to go inside.


Wednesday, September 19, 2012

The end of harvest




One month has passed since we started harvesting, and once again the cycle has closed, and the grain is safely stored in the bins. It has been a month of hard work and long hours, worries about weather and frustration with machinery, but all in all it went very well. The rains interrupting harvest procedures were short lived and didn’t bring huge amounts of moisture, so we never had to stop for very long, nor did the quality of the grain suffer much. 

When we finished the last field yesterday evening the sun was already low in the west, casting a golden glow on the stubble stretching as far as the eye could see. 



How good to come home and sit by the fire under the immense starry sky, Milky Way stretching out overhead, reliving the highlights of the harvest with our little crew, talking about what lies ahead, but without the urgency that had been part of the preceding weeks. 

Autumn is right around the corner, the leaves are just starting to turn. My favourite time of the year is about to begin, and I plan to spend as much time as I can in the garden – warmed by the colours as much as the sun, and without any mosquitoes. What more could I possibly ask for?





Saturday, September 8, 2012

A harvest day





I am sitting in the tractor in the middle of the canola field that borders the Pembina River. A pyramid of dust is moving down the field to my right: the combine, swallowing swath after swath, steadily making its way down the field. The sky, forget-me-not blue, is almost translucent, the river glitters golden in the afternoon sun, its calm surface broken here and there by big rocks and small sandy islands. The water level has dropped considerably, as almost always in late summer, and flocks of geese gather here in the evenings to spend the night after foraging on nearby stubble fields, feasting on scattered barley or – even better – peas. A fluff of thistledown drifts by without wavering off its course, as if it knew where it was going, its soft white blending with the skiff of clouds feathered along the northern sky.

                          ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is what I wrote around this time yesterday, and it looks much like this today, except, perhaps, that the wind has picked up, and the dust is no longer a dense pyramid hiding the combine but a banner held high in some medieval battle. 

It is not only the increased wind, however: the whole atmosphere has changed from peaceful and pastoral to the other reality of farming: stress and hectic caused by unforeseen circumstances. By 10:30 I had been in town twice already, a round trip of forty-five kilometers each. Starting up the big grain truck this morning Johann smelled something ominous: sure thing – the starter had quit. Working to get it out Johann and Magnus needed a special wrench missing from the impressive but still never quite complete collection they have at hand. Fortunately the Bumper to Bumper store in town had them in stock, so I just had to pick one up – except that it turned out to be the wrong size, and I had to go back and exchange it. 

Now, partway through the afternoon, Magnus has finally been able to get the starter out. How long it will take the auto electric repair guy in town to fix it is anybody’s guess, but quite likely the truck will be out of commission over the weekend. It’s a nuisance, but one that can be overcome. We will make do with the three old, much smaller grain trucks. 

This was not the first thing that went wrong this morning, however. Unloading canola from the grain cart into the semi of the commercial trucker who was going to take it to the canola crushing mill Johann bumped against the side of the trailer with the unloading auger of the grain cart, bending a hydraulic cylinder. Fortunately this doesn’t seem to have been bad enough to harm it seriously - just one more battle scar for the grain cart. 


The old adage that things happen in threes must have a grain of truth: as if this weren’t enough troubles Johann solidly plugged the combine almost as soon as he had started. This happens most often when the swath has been compressed and piled high during swathing because of unfavorable conditions: grain lodged in a low area, for example, or, in this case, a canola variety that couldn’t withstand wet conditions and grew long and lanky and didn’t stand up nicely. When the combine encounters a pile like that it can easily happen that it bites off more than it can chew all at once, and with a terrible roar and rumble and screech everything stops, and nothing turns any longer. If it is really bad it can take half an hour or even an hour to get it going again, and that’s what happened today. I mentally check the calendar. No, it’s not Friday the thirteenth, much as it seems like one.

It is almost seven in the evening, and the wind has died down. It is hazy, dust particles suspended in the air from the harvesting going on all around. After the problems early in the day everything has settled into its pattern again. Magnus is unloading the trucks into the grain bin at home, using some free time in between to finish swathing the few acres of barley left in the low lying peaty areas; Johann is still on the combine that has obediently swallowed everything it encountered without any more hiccups, and I am waiting for him in the cab of my tractor, ready to take the next load into the grain cart. There are only ten or twelve swaths left, another couple of hours, maybe three. 

The peaceful atmosphere has returned. I just opened the tractor door and heard the honking of many, many geese not far away. Here they come now, an undulating line drawn in the early evening sky, lifting and falling and lifting again before it makes its final descent toward the river. Watching it, I’m suddenly reminded of last night’s northern lights. Unlike most others this one was special because it didn’t have dancing sheets of light, but was instead nothing more than a bi-colored, slightly wavering thin band, a diadem arching across the sky, pale yellow over brick red.

There are dust, and noise, and breakdowns, there is stress and tension and fatigue, but there is the gratification of working together as a family, the satisfaction of overcoming obstacles and accomplishing something; there are the hawks soaring, suspended like kites on invisible strings, there is the sky filled with thousands of geese and billions of stars, the moon slipping huge and golden from its hiding place behind the horizon; there is the coyote trotting along the swath looking for mice, and there are white butterflies fluttering in groups of twos or threes in the warm September sun as if it would stay summer forever.

There is the long day with all it brings, and at the end of the day all is well.