Well it certainly looks like fall now, even if it doesn’t feel like the prelude to winter just yet.

How many of us woke up to a typical socked-in rainy day and donned all sorts of weather protection before heading out to work, only to toss it aside in an over-heated state of bewildering climate confusion? I did.

At any rate, the rain is a nice change and we certainly need it. Mom says this season has been very hard on the soil. She is spreading spent sweat pea vines on the parched garden, and dad has been spreading manure everywhere he can get the manure spreader into, and even some areas where he really can’t, but does anyways.

I am carrying on trying to bring order to the cooler and root-house, now that the last of the potatoes are washed and sorted, and the last, final and ultimate row of carrots has been dug. I actually saw the side wall of the cooler today when I was taking things out for market. One of those thrills that I don’t really expect too many people to relate to, but there you go. It was thrilling.

Not so thrilling was the pre-winter storage cleaning and greasing of the potato harvester, which was on the week’s project list. There are something like 20 grease points to service, several hydraulic oil reservoirs to check, a bunch of drive chains to oil, and of course the dirt was everywhere. Lots of it just blew off and settled on my person, on account of the dryness. In the deepest reaches I found a collection of withered carrots dangling from a roller, remnants of the failed attempt to use the harvester in the carrots. Every time I turned my head, heading for the next grease nipple, I either banged it on something, or noticed another deposit of dirt and debris, or both. For good measure, stuff kept falling in my eyes. Oh, I spent a wonderful few hours in and about the Grimme SE 75-30.

I had planned to talk about pricing in this week’s column, and then someone at market today made a real point of complaining about price and threw his potatoes down in protest. It was a bad day to complain about price. The drive down to the city was a rainy, foggy, poor visibility throw-back to the old days complete with lines of traffic cones, we were soaked to the bone within minutes of unhooking the trailer, our sales were about half what they were the week before and there have been no weekends off since July.

I muttered something about it being a free country and he could go get the cheap stuff any old time and I privately reflected that his belly ache was probably due to eating cheap tainted recalled beef and left it at that. He left, obviously disappointed that there wasn’t more of a fight — turns out I am too tired to tussle.

I am getting pretty weary now. This is the second to last weekend of both Saturday and Sunday Vancouver markets. Then we get a weekend off, and then the Saturday winter markets begin. I am looking forward to the winter markets because they are in a different location and this definitely falls into the coping category of change-is-better-than-a-holiday.

Anna Helmer comes from Pemberton, where Chad Gilmour grew a championship 1,044 lb pumpkin this year. Yes, indeed.