harvest season

The time has come for my dear plot of land to be turned upside down, its contents spilled into baskets which I will cart off and eventually feed to my chickens.  This week, knowing that the peanuts were well-overdue for harvesting I put all other work aside, threw on my American flag baseball cap (gotta represent) and off to the field I went with as many baskets as I could scrounge up from my hut.  All two of them.  I looked forward to the full day of farm work.  

Come to my plot of land and I find that I am indeed quite late on harvesting.  The entire field has overgrown itself with other weeds as well (it’s been a busy couple of weeks, okay?) and I see that my harvest day is going to be more strenuous than I had premeditated.  So I press play on an episode of “Fresh Air” (man, I miss NPR), roll down my pant-legs, and get to it.  

At first I think that my peanuts have simply disappeared: I cannot find them through the high weeds.  Earlier in the season I had had an intruder to my field, a hungry cow had wondered onto my plot of land destroying a good forth of my corn crop; I thought perhaps she had also taken up my peanuts.  But eventually I started to recognize the yellow-green leaves of the peanut plant and, on hands and knees, scuttled through my fields carefully pulling them up.  Peanuts are of my favorite plants to harvest because, like potatoes, they always make me feel as if I’m taking part in a treasure hunt.  You have to carefully dig them up, sweeping away the dirt carefully so as not to break the roots and forever loose product into the ground.  When you do successfully pull up the shells of a healthy plant it is the most fulfilling feeling; a bunch of peanut shells like you would get at the circus dance about, dangling from the roots of the plant.  

From the beginning of this work I realized that I’d also have to start pulling corn off the stalks.  My field was indeed a mess of tall, stinging weeds and the only way I was going to get a clean harvest of peanuts would be to clear the entire field on the way.  This was fine: the corn was prepared to be harvested, I had just been letting it dry out into the feed it was destined to become for my chickens.  I spent four hours pulling up peanuts, retching off corn, and tearing up everything that was to be left behind.  I am three-fourths way through my field when I realize that the produce already dismembered was going to take many trips back and forth to my hut in the few baskets I had.  If I were a regular Malagasy in this town I would have a cow-drawn wagon to do the work in one trip.  Alas, I am a silly foreigner only pretending.  So it was back and forth to the hut for me!

I am now in the process of drying out the corn and peanuts.  All this means is that I need to set it out on a mat in the sun for a day or two and make sure it doesn’t get gobbled up by chickens.  The latter part of this mission however, is quite a difficult one as the chickens in this town are fierce and I am too hyper of a lady to sit with a stick watching them.  Again, if I were any real Malagasy, I would enlist a toddler to act as guardian for me.