Harvest

As I write this my children are sucking down very cheap, sweet strawberries, a steamer full of pears destined to be pulped for iceblocks is hissing away on the stove and a box full of plums is waiting to become a year’s supply of plum sauce for our small family unit.

It’s this time of year that I miss life on a farm the most.  The mornings are crisp, the days are still bright and warm and evening brings fog and chill.  Harvest time. 

Anyone who’s ever lived on a farm and grown their own food will tell you that harvest can last almost all year.  But there are definitely peaks and troughs.  Spring is one of the busiest times for farmers but it’s not necessarily the time when they eat best – that time would be now.  Stone fruits.  Berries.  Pumpkins.  Leeks.  Everything worth eating is ready for harvest now. 

I’m a huge fan of stone fruits.  If my husband shared my love of peaches there would be crisp, sweet pie shells, loaded with fruit and the tiniest sprinkling of brown sugar and cinnamon.  Poor man’s tart – nothing more than a quarter of a sheet of puff pastry generously smeared with mascarpone, topped with sliced peaches and again the sprinkling of brown sugar and cinnamon.  Preserved peaches, permanently golden and suspended in syrup.  Peach halves baked, their centres full of ricotta mixed with cinnamon and honey.

This year I thought I would miss out on plum sauce.  I didn’t find anyone with a plum tree who had spare ones going and the shops never did sell them cheap enough to justify buying them.  Then yesterday they were $4.50 a kilo at Coles – the cheapest I’ve seen them yet and the gentleman at the fruit shop urged me to grab them because it’s been a bad season for plums and it would probably be the cheapest I’d see them. 

I don’t like buying from the supermarkets.  When I was a teenager I worked on an organic farm as a jillaroo.  The produce was incredible – so much better than what you get in a supermarket, if not quite as uniform, shiny and huge*.  Every Friday my boss would take a van full of succulent fruit and veg around Canberra, selling a huge variety of produce to the finest restaurants. 

When I asked him why he didn’t just sell it in bulk to the supermarkets and save himself a long trip, he explained that the price a supermarket would pay per kilo was less than he would pay me to pick it.  The restaurants paid a lot more and they weren’t fussy about the containers it came in either, so grateful were they for good, organic produce at cheap prices.

This is foremost in my mind when I ask the Coles manager whether he will give me a discount for buying 10 kilos of plums.  He is appalled I bothered to ask.

“Coles doesn’t negotiate price,” he sneers and I shrug and leave it.

Today I visited the markets where the wives and mothers of the grocers still make their own preserves and sauces.  I asked about plums for saucing and was instantly given a box of close to 10 kilos for $20. 

“Very sweet,” I was assured, “And perfect for sauce.  You need more?  Come back quick, the season’s nearly over.”

These days the scale of harvest activities is not as large for me as it was on the farm.  We buy what we need and make it into what we will use.  On the farm it was a dash to get as much as we could while the getting was good and transform it into something we could use and/or sell throughout the year.  Jams, sauces, preserves, wines and liqueurs. 

Back in those days things were far more raw than life is now and the seasons were measured, not as much by calendar as by the feel of the weather and the produce that was growing.  I felt a closer kinship to the pagan calendars back then.  Beltane for the start of the year with the cleansing fires, the birth of new things.  And Samhain, the harvest festival at the closing of the year when the hours of daylight began to dwindle.  A more natural way to mark the passing of time than the counting of days.

Nothing brings those days back now like this time of year when the cool morning air reminds me to start preserving for the year ahead.

*  Genetic refinement, wax and over-watering.