The Truth About Harvest Season Nobody Shows You 🍂

Harvest season always looks beautiful in pictures.

There are baskets overflowing with vegetables, rows of colorful jars and freshly picked produce spread across an old farmhouse table.

What you do not see is the rest of the kitchen.

The jars are everywhere. The pressure canner seems to live on the stove. There are vegetables covering every available surface, and there are cherry tomatoes slowly rotting in the refrigerator because there are only so many cherry tomatoes one family can eat.

Everything Is Ready at the Same Time

The garden does not care what else you have planned.

It does not care that the animals need to be fed, the farm store needs to be stocked, orders need to be filled or that you were hoping to sit down for five minutes.

When the vegetables are ready, they are ready.

At the end of summer, it feels like everything needs to be picked, washed, prepared and preserved at the same time. You can spend all morning in the garden, come inside with baskets full of vegetables and realize that the real work is only beginning.

You cannot just leave everything sitting there for a week while you catch up. Vegetables do not wait patiently for you to find the time.

And no matter how hard you try, something always gets away from you.

This year it has been the cherry tomatoes in the refrigerator. We have eaten them, cooked with them and given them away, but you can only eat so many. Every time I open the refrigerator, there seem to be even more of them waiting for me.

Eventually, some begin to rot before I can get to them.

I hate wasting anything we worked so hard to grow, but that is also part of the reality. Sometimes the garden produces more than you have the time, space or energy to preserve.

The Jars Take Over the House

By this point in the season, jars are everywhere.

There are empty jars waiting to be filled, full jars cooling on the counter and more jars that need to be washed and put away.

The pressure canner is always on the stove. As soon as one batch is finished, there is usually something else waiting.

It sounds simple when you say you are going to preserve the garden.

You pick the vegetables, put them in jars and store them for winter.

In reality, there is washing, trimming, peeling, chopping, blanching, cooking, filling jars, wiping rims, processing everything correctly and then cleaning the entire kitchen afterward.

Pressure canning can take a good part of the day by the time the canner heats up, reaches the proper pressure, processes the food and cools down safely.

Then there is water bath canning for the foods that require that method.

Finding enough hours in the day to pressure can and water bath all the vegetables we are picking is probably the hardest part of the end of summer. All of this is happening while we are still feeding the animals, caring for the farm, making products and running a business.

There never seems to be enough time.

Pressure Canning or Water Bath Canning?

One question people often have when they begin preserving food is when to use a pressure canner and when to use a water bath canner.

The basic difference comes down to the acidity of the food.

Tomatoes can be a little confusing because they may need bottled lemon juice or citric acid added according to the tested recipe, even when they are being processed in a water bath canner.

The Refrigerator Everyone Said Was Too Big

One of the best things I ever bought for the farm was my commercial two door refrigerator.

When I bought it, everyone told me it was too big.

They could not imagine why we would ever need that much refrigerator space.

I can tell you now that it still never seems big enough.

During harvest season, it fills up faster than you would believe. There are vegetables waiting to be washed, produce waiting to be preserved, ingredients for the business and all the regular food a family needs.

No matter how much space you have on a homestead, you eventually find a way to fill it.

That refrigerator has saved us more times than I can count, especially when I cannot get to everything the same day it is picked. It gives me a little extra time, although apparently not enough time to save every cherry tomato.

The Part Nobody Photographs

Nobody usually takes pictures of the kitchen after hours of canning.

Nobody shows the sticky floor, the overflowing sink or the vegetables still waiting on the counter when you are too tired to deal with one more thing.

People see the finished jars lined up on the shelf.

They do not see how tired you were when you finally heard the last lid seal.

There is a great deal of satisfaction in looking at food we grew and preserved ourselves. In the middle of winter, opening a jar from our own garden makes all of this work feel worthwhile.

But I am not going to pretend that harvest season is peaceful.

It is hot, messy and relentless. It tests your patience, your energy and your ability to find space for one more basket of vegetables.

By the end of it, you are proud of what you accomplished, but you are also completely worn out.

I Am Ready for Fall

By this point every year, I am ready for fall.

I am ready for cooler air, slower growth and fewer vegetables demanding my immediate attention.

I am ready to walk into the kitchen without seeing another pile that needs to be washed, chopped or put into jars.

Winter on a farm is never truly a break. The animals still need care, the business still needs to run and there is always another project waiting.

But the pace changes.

After the rush of planting, growing, picking and preserving, that change feels like a relief.

Harvest season is beautiful. It is also chaotic, tiring and sometimes completely overwhelming.

Both things can be true.

The full jars, stored potatoes and stocked refrigerator remind me why we do this. They will feed us long after the garden has gone quiet.

But honestly, I am ready for the garden to go quiet for a little while.