It seems as though I blinked and summer disappeared. Fall has arrived and that means harvesting all the hard work put in over the last few months.
Before digging up our own crop for this week’s dinner, we volunteered with Whidbey Island Winery to assist in harvesting their Siegerrebe and Angevine grapes out at French Road Farm. It was therapeutic work after sitting in front of a computer all week.
We arrived around 8:30 a.m. received a pair of clippers, a bucket and some basic instructions:
- Keep the bucket close to the vines so you don’t lose grapes
- Cut close as you can to the cluster of grapes
- Don’t cut yourself with clippers
In about four hours we all harvested about 10,000 lbs of grapes that would be crushed after lunch.
The work was rewarding for me. Perhaps because I only had to harvest for half the day, but each bucket of grapes made me smile.
I loved the time in the vineyard and knowing that we had some small bit of sweat equity in what we will probably drink down the road.
The lunch and wine the winery provided didn’t hurt either, but just as rewarding was meeting people in our community who joined us in this endeavor.
Community. Wine. Food. Farm.
(and ocean and mountains)
It’s why we moved here all along.
life in the sound 