Check out this week’s Essex Farm news from Kristin Kimball‘s blog:

“Miranda and I took a ride to the raspberries after school on Monday. The pony kicked up thick clouds of dust that hovered in the golden afternoon light. The air was full of the dry, decaying smells of autumn. Mary chased the crows around Pine field, leaving zigzag contrails of dust in her wake.

Taylor was disking down the flowers in Mailbox field – the mighty sunflowers going down to meet the soil they had come from – and we stopped to pay our respects to their faded beauty. As the pony lipped the weeds at the edge of the field and Miranda held fast to his mane I reached down into the turned earth and found it was damp, somehow still holding water just under the dust. That stored moisture has helped germinate the millions of seeds that Scott planted all over the farm in the last two weeks: cover crops of rye, just now shoving up to the surface in a thick red haze, and of oats and peas, coming up in green regular rows. When I look at those young plants I see future nitrogen, and future carbon, and by extension the stash of organic matter that enables the soil to hold on to moisture despite weeks and weeks of very little rain.

We moved on to Superjoy, where the crew was harvesting winter squash, filling the bucket of the skid steer. Delicata alone filled five large bins, and the butternut lay ready for pickup, stretched across the field in long, heavy windrows. Next door, the pumpkins were huge orange beacons under browned leaves…” Continue Reading this Essex Farm Note.

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