(This piece originally ran in Notes from the Field, a weekly column part of the main newsletter sent to Waltham Fields Community Farm CSA-holders. At the time, I was a volunteer and not employed as a farmer.)

This week, one of the crops we harvested was radishes. The process for harvesting radishes resembles that of many other crops: find and pull up a plant, check for quality, prune the foliage, gather the right number into a bundle, tie them off, and repeat. But when held by the stems, a bundle of radishes is floppy, making banding difficult. We chatted about technique while harvesting, and everyone has their own: for instance, some people hold the stems radish-down, perpendicular to the ground, while I have more success with a 45-degree angle. But then, we all make different tiny movements to complete a bundle, like catching the rubber band with the offhand thumb. When we become comfortable with an activity, the distance between the tool and our body vanishes, and instead of moving our hands to move objects, we move the objects directly. The tool, the radishes, the rubber bands: all become an extension of ourselves. And this complexity of action creates a banded bundle of beautiful vegetables, ready to be washed.

Against complacency, I have learned, is the phenomenon of “harvest creep”. When we as harvesters become comfortable with gathering bunches, the sizing of a bunch can almost be done by feel. This feel can be quite precise: I hear legend of folks able to pick up not only bundles of vegetables but even rubber bands and immediately know whether they are of the wrong size. And yet, the key is the “almost”, since as one harvests, the size of gathered bundles tends to “creep” up in size. In a way, I find harvest creep reassuring: avoiding it means our attention is a necessary part of the process. We are not rote actors, but rather overseers, active gatherers for this part of the cycle.

So in the field on Friday, we enjoyed perhaps one of the last warm days of the year. And we counted the radishes, just to be sure.