Summer Harvest Season

Late summer in the garden is always an amazing time. The sunflowers are bursting and covered with bees, the glossy red tortilla corn is drying on the tall stalks, the enormous magenta heads of amaranth flowers reach towards the sky. Plants soar over the head, giant pumpkins shine golden below tangles of vines, and structures are buried beneath the weight of green gourd and grape leaves.

Work in the summer garden centers on harvesting the fruits and cutting back over-growth. Colleagues who leave their car windows rolled down find bags of fresh produce on their seats, and boxes of vegetables are sent to the food pantry. It is hard to keep up with the abundance!

The student work force has been away for the summer, and the garden eagerly awaits their return! The students will soon have jobs picking the hundreds of beans, shucking the corn, recovering the paths from the wandering pumpkins, threshing the grains and saving seeds for next year.

In the midst of all of the harvesting, it is also time to plant the fall and winter crops. We cut away squash vines, (which are reluctant to give up their real estate), to make room for kale, chard, cauliflower, beets, carrots. The sun still blazes on most days, so we cover the tender cool weather crops with white fabric and keep them watered often so they don’t wilt.

This year the middle school students will be preparing weekly harvest baskets for two lucky families who won the bidding in the school gala auction. The students will learn how community supported agriculture (CSA) works; CSA principles are based on Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy, yet another manifestation of the founder of Waldorf education’s creative solutions towards the improvement of agriculture. The CSA model has spread throughout the world, and provides support for farmers who must constantly take risks in growing crops. The basic foundation of the CSA model centers around a commitment from consumers to buy produce from a farmer throughout a season; thus the consumer and farmer essentially become “partners” in the act of growing food for one year.