This time of year encompasses the many kinds of harvests. With October just around the corner, we look forward to bright blue skies and puffy white clouds. Windy days, the kind that are perfect for airing blankets and the winter clothing on clotheslines, are part of the autumn scene. Frosts on the pumpkin become a reality, and for me it was always a time to be a scavenger and store up whatever will be needed for winter. That urge still exists and although I’m limited for space now, I still “store up” things I might need.

Harvesting the potatoes from our big gardens was always a fun time. Digging a crop of homegrown Green Mountain or Russet potatoes is a satisfying task. We always had a cool cellar and a wooden bin to house our crop.

On early day farms, harvest time was a very important end to the summer; but it was also a happy time. Neighbors helped one another in the weeks before weather turned too cold and too late to gather crops. Farmers got together to get in silage – a necessary winter food for the cattle. They cut the hefty corn stalks, carted them to the farmyard near the silo, and there they were chopped and lifted inside by large forkfuls, to stay protected and ready for the winter feeding program.

Today, this annual chore is handled by machines that cut the stalks, chop or grind them, and blow them into the tall silos. Neighborhood crews still move from farm to farm in areas where there are many agricultural communities.

In early days it was a real necessity to “get up” a large woodpile to feed slabs into the several stoves generally needed in farmhouses. It is still something that happens even now, in rural places, where fireplaces and wood stoves supply all or part of a household’s heat. With the present shortage of oil, it will be an operation we’ll see repeated this year, as homeowners strive to keep oil bills from bankrupting them. In Vermont, where daughter Laurie lives, the big woodpile has been in place for several weeks. She has an efficient wood stove that does an excellent job, supplemented by gas heat when she isn’t home.

Harvest time enters the kitchen realm, also. Cooks are busy using up garden produce before it is claimed by frost. About now it is time to seek out the wild grapes to make the winter supply of jelly and jam. Apples are stored in bins where there are cool cellars and winter squash and pumpkins and the last of the big cabbage plants join them.

Even on a small scale, I fit the small freezer space with a loaf of bread, a pint of milk, meat to make a soup, and vegetables in packages to use for the soups. In the back of the freezer I have put aside a container of berries my friend Bob Hurd brought me, and some of homemade applesauce. They’ll be especially good on a cold, snowy day in January!

I buy some extra batteries for the little radio and extra light bulbs and paper towels. I know it’s silly, but it saves going shopping on a miserable winter day.

There was one hummingbird checking out the few flowers in my yard, last week, but they are gone, now. I’m sure. I hung out a suet cake Saturday and in an hour the woodpecker had found it. The titmice and chickadees are more often coming for sunflower seeds in the globe feeder Laurie sent. The goldfinches still come to the thistle feeder, but they are no longer gold, having donned their drab winter coats. The season is changing.

The words that ended the column last week were by Charles DeGaulle from an item in Newsweek.

Who said “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves”?