Don’t you love it when all the individual parts of a project come together in a perfect sequence? That’s how it felt this weekend at the farm. Knowing that rain was on its way, the crew and I gathered on Sunday morning for the big potato harvest. With nervous anticipation we fired up the old potato digger, which can be a temperamental piece of equipment on its best days. Creeping along the beds in low-range, the digger rattled and clanked and shook and shimmied, and began to spit out a beautiful carpet of potatoes in its wake. By lunchtime we had dug and collected 2000 pounds of Magic Molly and Keuka Gold spuds and ferreted them away in the root cellar. Monday morning, while most of the crew worked on hauling another ton of food out of the fields, this time in the form of winter squash, Nick raced around the now-vacant potato fields on the tractor, disc harrowing them smooth. The final step of sowing several hundred pounds of oat seed over the smooth ground happened just as the first raindrops started to fall. And now we wait. In just a few days’ time today’s rain and the coming sun will sprout the oat seed, and we will wake up one morning to a green sea of cover crop blanketing our fields. Just in time for fall!Now, on to this week’s very colorful harvest!