Once again, the following post was written awhile ago and not posted. Blame it on the grantwriting work that is piling up on every available surface in my home office. Sorry no pictures this time-- I just want to get this posted and move on to the next topic. This post was written in early November.

While it may be only starting to get really cold for all my friends 100 miles south in new York, here in Columbia County we’ve been getting hard frosts since the beginning of October. Still, that wasn’t the end of the harvest season; while tomato harvest was over as soon as the plants froze, plenty of other vegetables just sat there until we got around to harvesting them—including beets, turnips, carrots, fennel, brussel sprouts, and some greens.

Unfortunately, once they were picked, though, that was the end. In the height of summer, many plants will just keep sending out new fruits to replace the ones we pick. But once it’s cold, everything stops growing, and what’s in the ground is all you’ve got left.

In the midst of the dwindling harvest, we spent much of October putting the farm to rest for the winter. The remains of the tomato plants, along with the stakes that heroically staved off chaos in the field, were pulled out of the ground, along with the irrigation hoses that ran under them. Cover crops—oats and rye—were planted over vast swaths of the farm as the plants that formerly grew there died and were pulled out. (These crops will not be harvested, but were planted to fix the soil and guard against erosion.)

So, as Bob began planning various winter projects and Karyn hunkered down in her warm, indoor office to work on educational workshops, actual farm work dwindled. In an instance of perfect timing, it was at this point that I managed to secure another consulting gig (grantwriting for a Latino community organizing non-profit in New York City), so my days at the farm—at least for this year—are over.

I’m giving some thought to whether I want to continue this blog and branch out to broader food policy issues and talk a bit about the international food relief world that I’ve entered as an employee of Action Against Hunger. More on that soon.

In the meantime, one more story about the ever-entertaining chickens. Last week Karyn and I (along with Nancy, one of the Mexican farm workers, who could probably run the place if her English were better) were harvesting squash out of the children’s garden, which is in full view of the chicken house, when we noticed that, once again, several had flown the coop. Karyn was mystified—there’s chicken wire and netting all around the bottom of the chicken house, so even though they can get outside and peck around the ground under the house, they’re not supposed to be able to escape onto the larger farm, thus exposing themselves to predators and dehydration when they can’t get back inside.

But as Karyn watched, she finally caught one in the act. Apparently there was a hole in the netting, where it wasn’t completely fastened to the ground. This hole was tiny—it couldn’t have stretched to more than two inches off the ground. But the chicken, with a confidence that proved she had done it many times before, stuck her head under the netting and more or less crawled out of the enclosure. (Until then, I was unaware that chickens could imitate crabs.)

Moreover, when another chicken decided it was bored in the big wide world and wanted to rejoin its friends, it stuck its head under the netting and made the reverse trip.

Chickens, as Karyn once again reminded me, are not dumb birds.