Where do vegetables come from? They come from the sky, and this is how. Before you can plant a carrot or lettuce seed, you need living soil. Living soil starts up in the sky where the tips of the trees catch the wind and the rain. After soaking in the sun and drinking the rain all summer, the leaves come fluttering down to earth, where they end up in my wheelbarrow.

Look at a wheelbarrow full of leaves and you’re looking at your future salad. Over the winter and into spring, bacteria and fungi and earthworms and a million other organisms will take this bounty that drifted out of the sky, and turn it into living soil which will grow your future salad.

Speaking of the sky, more than leaves live up there, so do the swans and snow geese. Working outdoors lets you hear and see the trumpeters when they fly overhead. At first you hear them honking. Half the time they go by behind the trees, out of view. It doesn’t matter. Even if you can’t see them, hearing them brings plenty of joy.

When the snow geese go by, you can’t miss them. They love to party. They fly by in the hundreds and thousands, all of them talking at the same time.

I picked the last bowl of tomatoes today. It was time to toss the tomato plants in the compost and save a few tomatoes for the kitchen. The rest of the tomatoes I gave to the chickens. Next to worms and bugs, chickens love sweet, juicy produce like melons and bananas and grapes. They enjoy juicy tomatoes too.

Two summers ago, these tomatoes were tree leaves high above the ground. Now they are inside a chicken, though not for long. They’ll get ground up, nutrients extracted, and the unused bits will soon pop out the chicken’s butt. Then it’s a sojourn into the soil before getting sucked up by tree roots and carried to the top of the trees to spend a summer in the sky again. Everything goes round and round and round.

My intention was to turn this pumpkin into several dishes: pumpkin pie, roast pumpkin, pumpkin miso-ni, etc. It’s decorating the gateway instead. Maybe after halloween I can cut it up and eat it.

More pullets are laying now. For the first time in several months, there were more than a dozen eggs today. March and April are the peak of egg production for the flock here. By the end of June the count is noticeably lower, and it usually keeps going down until it picks up again after the New Year. This year, it is increasing early on account of new pullets wanting to lay eggs.

Supposedly hens need 14 hours of daylight in order to lay eggs. My experience is that this isn’t always the case. We are down to 11 hours of visible daylight now and will be down to 9 hours in late December. Even in the darkest days of winter, there are some hens laying eggs. Egg laying is very strong by early March when there are just 12 hours of visible light, so the 14 hour “rule” isn’t something my chickens know about. I won’t tell them. They don’t need another thing to worry about. “Oh, dear, there are just 10 hours of daylight and yet I’m laying eggs. Maybe there is something wrong with me? Should I go to the vet?” No, they don’t need to know that rule.

Each egg is so different. Rarely are there two eggs so similar they are hard to tell apart. Most eggs are distinct. Why do store eggs all look alike? Do they banish hens which have personality? What happens to those hens who lay eggs with a flare? I don’t want to think about it.

There is so much color this time of year. Mint never stops blooming once it starts. Maple leaves are turning a warm rust color. A row of freshly planted shallots and garlic turns into a quilt of many colors when I cover it with a thick layer of fall leaves.

I saw an article about a sweet potato farm in Japan started several hundred years ago. An integral part of the farm was a deciduous forest next to the fields. Over the centuries the farmers have continuously raked fallen leaves out of the forest and spread them over the fields. The result is that the soil in the fields is soft and many feet deep, letting oxygen filter deep into the ground and maintain a healthy biology for the sweet potatoes to grow.

In another row, a shallot planted several weeks ago is sprouting. Shallot sprouts are always fun to watch. Instead of a single stem poking up out of the ground like garlic, shallots send up whole hands of slender green fingers into the air.