There's nothing better than a fifth wheel full of pumpkins on a foggy autumn morning. Photo taken September 22, 2018.
My first musings about running a farm originated at Jubilee Farm in Carnation, located along the shores of the Snoqualmie River, just about 30 miles east of Seattle. Jubilee is a family-owned and operated CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm raising diversified vegetables, fruits, flowers, pork, beef, and eggs, which they distribute as weekly shares to their CSA members. I will write more about my amazing experiences at Jubilee in another blog post, but this post is specifically about how working at Jubilee made me fall in love with the autumn season and inspired me to create my own small farm.
The workshare program at Jubilee ran for 20 weeks between June and October, and I participated for seven years between 2013 and 2020. Every week, I worked a four-hour shift in the field, and in exchange, I was “paid” with a CSA box full of seasonal produce. After spending most of the spring and summer planting, weeding, harvesting, and washing produce, it was such a relief when the cooler fall temperatures rolled in, and the pace and pressure in the wash-pack station slowed down just a bit. The uniqueness of autumn crops such as the Cucurbita genus of plants (squashes, gourds, and pumpkins) is that fact that they don’t require immediate processing (washing or cooling). In contrast to a lot of the summer crops such as salad greens or root vegetables, Cucurbits don’t mind staying out in the weather post-harvest. In fact, the Cucurbits are the only crops that we strategically clipped from the vines, piled high in the fields, and just left there… Of course, after a few days or a week, we would come back with the truck and trailer to collect them, but the longer they cured, the better. The longer they sat off the vine, the longer the natural sugars would develop and deepen the flavor profile.
I enjoyed everything about the Cucurbits. I felt like a little girl again, on a treasure hunt, slinging a pair of loppers over my shoulders and wading through dense vines and leaves to find the biggest, brightest pumpkins and squashes. I loved the heavy lifting that is necessarily involved with harvesting large Cucurbits and hauling them into piles closer to the aisles. I practiced squatting and balancing as many pumpkins as I could on my thighs before standing up and staggering over to the zone where I would squat again and let them gently roll to the ground.
It was a different kind of challenge to find the smaller gourds. Although they were easier to carry in produce crates, they were harder to find compared to their bigger cousins. Finding gourds felt like winning a prize because each one is so unique in shape, color, and contour. I began to admire these fruits as not just food or Halloween decorations, but an incredible creation of art that nature gifts us this time of year.
Every weekend in October was a zoo at Jubilee. Families from all over Western Washington flocked to the farm for hay wagon rides out to the fields to pick pumpkins, squashes, and gourds. The attraction was more than just tractors and pumpkins, however. There were hay mazes and horseback pony rides. There was a trebuchet that launched pumpkins 50 yards down the pasture to watch them smash all over the field like a rotten tomato. Then all the children raced after the flying pumpkin to get there when it exploded on impact as if it were a pinata that busted open with Halloween candy instead of a pumpkin that busted open with stringy membranes and slimy seeds. But the kids got the same thrill either way. They sprinted to pick up the shattered pumpkin flesh and beelined to the pig pen to feed the lucky hogs who never got sick of eating pumpkins.
The Harvest Festival necessarily included indulging in the season’s bounty, so there was always food, food, and more food. Freshly shucked and boiled corn on the cob with generous pats of butter and salt. Grass-fed beef burgers from cattle born and raised right there on the farm. Old-fashioned apple cider hand-pressed behind the barn and warmed to perfection on the wrap-around stoop of the barn. Patty Pan Grill’s famous veggie quesadillas. Kettle corn and coffee trucks. Samples of baked squash from Blue Hubbard to Red Kuri to Black Futsu.
The big white barn was decorated for the season with dried corn stalks twined together and wrapped around the barn’s columns. Winter luxury pumpkins were lined up along the banisters to cure further; some would sell to community members and some would be made into pumpkin butter at the local cannery. The barn steps were arranged with only the biggest and brightest Jack-O-Lantern orange pumpkins. An assembly of hay bales was placed on the porch so families could sit and enjoy the ambiance. Sometimes, there were instrumentalists playing tunes and vocals as they propped up on those hay bales, entertaining folks as they wandered in and out of the farmstand. Smaller types of squashes and gourds were displayed in wooden produce crates at the side of the barn, such as the Carnival and Delicata. Positioned on the edge of the driveway was a flatbed trailer artfully stacked with a pyramid of larger squashes and pumpkins such as the Cinderellas and the Hubbards. The larger pumpkins formed a sturdy perimeter on the edge of the flatbed, which allowed the medium ones to tower towards the middle.
As a workshare member during the Harvest Festival, I served as a “field monitor” for a little bit, meaning I was stationed out in the pumpkin patch. I greeted wagons full of people as they arrived and briefed them on safety rules and pumpkin picking etiquette. The “field monitor” job included ground-guiding the tractor drivers as they approached, to make sure the load/unload area did not get too bottlenecked. Although crowd control was not my favorite activity at the farm, this experience provided unique insight into what seems to be a quintessentially American pastime. It was an opportunity to stand back and observe how much joy humans experience from collecting heavy orange globes out of the dirt. I couldn’t help but relate to every single fervorous child I saw, because I too, experience a child-like excitement when I get to run around a pumpkin patch as if it’s my playground.
Over the years, my admiration of autumn crops grew more and more intense. I convinced the owners at Jubilee to let me work beyond my scheduled shift so I could glean extra decor items like gourds, cornstalks, and pumpkins. Gleaning means I picked the ones that the public passed over or the excess that was leftover in the fields after the harvest was over for the year. It was an excuse for me to bring the farm cheer home with me, to remind me of the farm when I couldn’t be there. I took home boxes and baskets full of gourds so I could decorate my Seattle apartment. I figured out how to sanitize my bounty in mild bleach water to brighten the colors and prolong the shelf life. One particular year we had a bumper crop and I swear I covered every single flat surface in my apartment with gourds of various sizes and shapes. Since I lived in a small basement unit, I did not have a porch or any outdoor areas. So, whenever I would get invited to Octoberfest or Halloween parties at people’s homes, I would bring extra dried corn stalks bundled with amaranth, and lots of Cucurbits to decorate their porches and banisters. My family and friends kept pointing out that I had a talent for making autumn decor displays. I started dreaming about having my own farm someday… envisioning all the varieties of autumn crops I would grow and decorate with.
It was just a vision for a long time until one experience kicked me in the pants and put my dreams into motion. See the sequel blog post “The Watershed Moment” to read the next part of the story!
Copyright, all rights reserved, 2022, Kayla McCarthy.
(Author’s whereabouts upon publication: Brother's apartment, Chicago, Illinois, visiting big brother and his two precious cats).