The Fall of Virginia

It's another cloudy, rainy, cool day in Virginia.  Light breezes scatter leaves over paved surfaces and sprinkle the lawns with bright crimson red, silvery-gray, orange, and lemon yellow leaves.

The tobacco fields have been plowed and made ready for the winter.  It is amazing to think that this cycle of life has gone on for a couple hundred years.  Maybe tobacco one year, corn another, or a field may have been allowed to lie fallow and hopefully regenerate it's willingness to spring up another crop.

John Adams had just five acres to provide food for he and Abigail.  It was important back then to maximize space and minimize effort.  They HAD to grow enough food to feed the family but not so much as to waste it.  If they couldn't eat it quickly, can it for the winter supply, have enough room for it in the root cellar, or sell it at market, then they would have put forth effort  uselessly.  I think that, with our abundant supply year round of food on supermarket shelves, we don't appreciate what was required back then.  We in America take food very much for granted.

Thomas Jefferson and "Stonewall" Jackson's letters and journal are full of the kinds of vegetables that grew best in this area. Instead of water-cooler talk they had feed store chat.  Jefferson was always experimenting with different things.  Jackson's kitchen garden was essentially his whole back yard and was beautifully kept.  Their version of a scarecrow consisted of a huge potato tied by twine to a very supple sapling so that it would bounce up and down.

He then stuck huge (turkey?) feathers into the potato so crows and other birds would think it was a giant predator bird and be scared away.

Fall is the time to get our flowerbeds, vegetable gardens, and fields ready for a winter rest and prep'd for spring planting and growing.  It will soon be time for people to settle in for long winter nights, too.