My winter goat feed was delivered yesterday afternoon by the same father/son pair who delivers it every year. “Dad” isn’t a day under 90, and his son is in his late 60s. I always leap to help when they arrive. They would happily unload all the hay and stack it in the shed for me, but I can’t watch these two elderly gentlemen hauling hay bales while I do nothing.

Truth is, many of the neighbouring farmers could trade their tractors in for walkers. They work until their bodies give out, or until an accident or death claims them.

You might wonder why. Most of these guys are sitting on a fortune of land. They could sell out and retire in style instead of working themselves to death.

Paths wide enough for a walker?

I understand, though. Will I give up gardening as long as I can drag myself to the garden? No. It’s who I am. Even injury can’t keep me away—I’ve been known to do my gardening on hands and knees when a back injury prevented me from standing. Farmers are the same. Farming isn’t a job; it’s an identity. To retire is to lose oneself. The 90 year-old who delivers my hay every year is cheerful and spry for his age. He will always be a farmer. One day he’ll stop working, but not until he stops breathing.

The modern food system, with international trade and refrigerated transport, ensures that fresh tomatoes, cucumbers and other summer crops are always available, even in Maine in February. Want eggplant parmesan for New Year’s dinner? A special cucumber salad for Valentine’s day? Even in Maine, it’s no problem—you’ll find the ingredients in the supermarket.

A gardener’s food year is more seasonal. Some might say having year round supplies of summer fruits and vegetables is a great thing, and I don’t deny its appeal. But there is something to be said for seasonality. Nothing tastes sweeter than the first strawberry of the year, when you’ve been dreaming of strawberries for months. Nothing is more poignant than the last tomato, knowing it heralds winter, and eight months wait for the next juicy bite. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Vegetables herald, define, celebrate, and farewell seasons and annual events.

It’s difficult to capture the essence of seasonality in the garden. There is the early spring scrounge for anything still alive and edible, while you madly plan and plant for the future. There is the overwhelming abundance of summer, when the question shifts from “what is there to eat?” to “what needs to be eaten?” There is the frantic preserving of late summer, when you realise it all has to end. There is the calm of autumn, when the larder is full, and you know you can curl up like a chipmunk in your well-provisioned nest when the winter winds blow.

I tried to capture some of the garden year’s seasonality in this little graphic. It includes most of the annual crops we grow, though some are lumped together and others left out to minimise clutter. None of the perennial crops are included. But I hope it gives you an idea of what’s in and coming out of the garden at different times of year.

Special thanks to Ian for writing the R code to create this nifty little graphic.

In Christchurch, the City Council and the media are only just now recognising what we gardeners and farmers have known for two months. It’s dry. And hot.

It’s the fate of those who grow plants and raise livestock to grow grimmer and grimmer as everyone else trips off to the beach for yet another perfect summer day.

The grass has been dead for at least a month, new plantings have succumbed despite our efforts to water them, and even well established shrubs are showing stress. The poplars—large trees that have been here for forever—are shedding leaves.

Every day begins and ends with watering—food crops are the first priority, then new plantings, then (maybe) established plants. We are thankful for every drop of water that spills over from the neighbour’s irrigator.

Still, not everything will make it, even if it starts raining tomorrow (which it won’t). The ground is hot dust, so dry the water pools on the surface rather than soaking in. So we choose what to water and what not to water, what will live and what will die. We haul extra food to the livestock, because they have little to eat in the paddock. We watch the sky for clouds and sniff the air for smoke (header fires aren’t uncommon out here, and they can spread rapidly). We rescue what we can…then shrug and head to the beach with everyone else.