With a weekend of rain and temperatures forecast to dip into the 30s, a somewhat official final harvest of the community garden seemed in order. A date was set to dig potatoes, beets and carrots and pick corn, the last of the green beans and cucumbers and most of the green tomatoes.
Lucky for us, the days leading up to the cold, rainy weather were sunny and warm. Any day we chose was going to be beautiful, which meant, for the first time in my life, I would be bringing in the vegetable harvest in a T-shirt and shorts instead of my usual winter coat and mittens, cursing myself for not doing it earlier.
Meanwhile, the extraordinarily wet autumn has resulted in an exceptionally mosquito-intensive one, too. And, as I’ve written many times before, western Dakota mosquitoes follow none of the rules that mosquitoes are supposed to follow. They don’t mind full sun, they don’t wait for dusk, they can land on you even if it is windy, and they will bite all the way through your blue jeans.
This most recent hatching must sense winter is coming, because they are the nastiest, swarmiest buggers I’ve ever witnessed after a summer of very swarmy, nasty buggers.
You might be able to guess where this is going… The morning of our harvest date dawned cool and fresh. I went out to do my sheep chores in a light sweatshirt, smiling up at the rose-gold sky. And then the mosquitoes found me. Buzzing around my ears, attacking my neck and face, my pleasant thoughts were immediately replaced by self-flagellation. I sped through chores, continuously smacking myself, my enjoyment of the peaceful morning evaporating like the dew.
The day was no longer cool by the time I started digging potatoes. I was still wearing the sweatshirt, though, now with the hood cinched tight around my face. I started sweating immediately, and mosquitoes kept landing on my nose and sneaking snacks from any other exposed sliver of skin. “Darn mosquitoes,” I muttered as I worked. But there was a cool breeze, the earth was damp and soft, and the abundance of potatoes was distractingly satisfying to unearth.
Maybe the hungriest mosquitoes had gotten their fill after the first hour, or maybe they just took pity on me, but I eventually took off the sweatshirt, and it wasn’t that bad. Then, as it has so many times this summer, the work became its own reward, and I found myself smiling up at the sky once again, thankful to be there.
When I first floated the idea of a community garden with the other members of the Kithship Collective, the main goal was to grow food for folks who might not otherwise have access to garden-fresh produce and to have ingredients for community meals. The whole point of the Kithship Collective, however, is to celebrate not only our human neighbors, but also the other-than-human beings with whom we share this corner of the prairie. Well, we’ve achieved our goal and then some…
A big cooler full of potatoes will go to the school for students’ lunches. We held a “pay-what-you-can“ farmstand, hosted a big community dinner, and we’ve been sharing produce with friends and neighbors all summer.
We’ve also supplied the neighborhood deer with newly ripened tomatoes that were almost, but not quite, ready to pick; the bunnies with beet and carrot tops, and, less annoyingly, bumblebees with sunflower and zinnia nectar. Judging by the number of nightcrawlers we found while digging potatoes, we’ve kept the worms pretty happy, too. And now, on the final day of the garden, we were supplying the mosquitoes with a feast as well.
I keep writing about how much joy this garden has brought me, and I worry that it will come off as tiresome or trite, but I can’t help myself. I started this project because I wanted to do something helpful to benefit my community, and I think I succeeded in that, but I am quite sure the being who has benefited most is me.
