To Harvest Squash with Love

Today, we harvested 350 totes of winter squash—roughly 25,000 pounds. Tomorrow, we hope to do the same before the annual rains set in and the Snoqualmie River begins its flooding cycle onto our fields. We time this crop every year so that we are able to pull it out just before flooding, safely grown away from all other crops in its own private domain. It is sweetly, quietly hidden all summer long and left to mature in one of the prettiest places on our farm, the back 40. This area is always under water November through April, so the trick is making sure we don’t get caught early by October flooding.

This year, our varietals are Delicata, Butternut and Acorn with a few beds of pie pumpkins, Carnival and Rouge d’temps, all perfectly ready. We will continue this pace for two more days and hopefully have the majority safely in bins. Last year, which seems like a million years ago, we had the help of the entire 7th grade at Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences (SAAS). Last year, we sent most of the Delicata to Hopelink Food Bank in Carnation and hope to do even more this fall.

We had all hands on deck today, which was the first time we have all been together in the same field this year. Twenty-two of us spread out over acres was a very meaningful event. It was warm and bright, we laughed, and the momentum is far greater in a group. We had one moment in which we thought we could try and harvest 217,000 pieces to honor those lives lost to COVID thus far. It is an immensely sad number and a huge number. We desperately want this number to stop growing and will continue to do our part in staying safe and working hard to bring food into the many lives of frontline nurses and doctors.

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