This autumn, Vermont Public staffers have been getting outside as Vermonters harvest fruit, vegetable and animal products.
Digital producers Sophie Stephens and Zoe McDonald and reporter Elodie Reed brought back some sights of the season from a wool spinning class, apple orchard and potato plot.
Fall fibers
The 2024 Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival was held on Oct. 5-6, 2024 at the Tunbridge fairgrounds. Day two of the festival kicked off with chilly temperatures — and plenty of people used the opportunity to pull out their fleece and wool attire.
Three Angora goats greet visitors at the festival's Animal Barn on Oct. 6, 2024. Angora goats produce fleece used to make mohair yarn.
Snowshoe Farm brought alpacas to the festival this year. The United Nations has declared 2024 as the International Year of Camelids — and Vermont is home to alpacas, llamas and even camels.
Some of the fleeces that were submitted for the Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival's fleece show. Award-winning fleeces are picked on day one, and stay on display for the weekend. This year's "Best in Show" winner was given a ribbon with chickens printed on it due to a mix up. (The award usually has a sheep icon.)
Gnaomi Siemens learns to spin fiber at a beginner's spinning class held at the Tunbridge Town Hall during the festival. Siemens is learning how to spin and knit to make her own sweater for an Arctic expedition she'll go on in May. Siemens writes about climate change through a queer and ecofeminist perspective. "I wanted the gear for the expedition to be sort of part of my aesthetic journey."
Freshly spun fiber wraps around the bobbin, a part of a spinning wheel that rotates.
A person feeds fiber between two hands to create tension as they spin on a foot pedal-powered wheel.
Dyed yarn on display at the Green Mountain Spinnery booth at the Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival. Green Mountain Spinnery focuses on producing small-batch yarn.
Good apples
In Shoreham, Vermont, on the hills overlooking Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains, sits Champlain Orchards, where rows and rows of trees yield a fruit that has become synonymous with fall in New England. Champlain Orchards grows more than 100 varieties of apples, as well as berries and other fruits, like pears, pictured here on an overcast, late September day.
But in the fall, it’s all about apples. And Champlain Orchards has a lot of them – after a late spring freeze decimated Vermont's fruit harvest in 2023, Champlain Orchards' trees rebounded this year with an earlier and larger-than-expected bounty.
The orchard hosts visitors for pick-your-own experiences, but the real action happens away from the pick-your-own rows.
Most days, out among the more than 220-acres of fruit trees and rolling hills, you’ll find groups of H2-A workers, all of them from Jamaica, harvesting apples.
With double-ended baskets slung over their fronts, the workers set up tall ladders and work their way down the trees, picking ripe apples.
Some of the workers have been helping care for the trees and harvest their fruits for years. Dean Gordon said he’s traveled from his home in Jamaica to work at Champlain Orchards for 16 years.
Once they fill up their baskets, they empty them into a row of crates attached to a tractor, being careful not to bruise the apples. Today, they’re harvesting rows of Empire and McIntosh apples.
Clive “Preacher” Henry said he got his nickname because he’s a churchman in Jamaica. After the harvest is done, he’ll return home to sing in the choir.
A worker drives the full crates of apples to a big warehouse near the entrance of the orchard, where they’ll be processed — washed, sized, sorted and packed into boxes or bags — or used for baked goods like apple pies. (Bakers, take note: Jane Costello of The Stevens Farmstead, who was helping in the Champlain Orchards bakery that day, said Cortland apples are the best pie apples.) Certain varieties of apples, usually the bitter ones, will be juiced and turned into cider — also the namesake ingredient in the orchards’ popular cider donuts. Champlain Orchards sends its apples across the state and region. They also keep hundreds of crates of apples in a cold storage room to last through harvest season and beyond.
The "Great Potato Harvest"
Jericho resident Ann Squires, left, and Saxon Hill School pre-K student Gavin, age 4, help with the "great potato harvest" behind Deborah Rawson Memorial Library in Jericho on Wednesday, Sept. 18. Following the community harvest, the potatoes are donated to the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church food shelf.
Ann Squires carries a fresh armload of potatoes over for cleaning.
Jericho resident Geoff Cole, left, pulls up potato greens with a helper from Saxon Hill School's pre-K "rainbow class."
Susan Adams, center, oversees the gardens at the Deborah Rawson Memorial Library and is in charge of the great potato harvest — though she makes sure to point out that Eric Wood, in the white hat to the left, is the "potato man" who administers the potato planting. Susan says a number of volunteers also help weed all summer.
Each year, the Deborah Rawson Memorial Library tries to grow and donate 300 pounds worth of potatoes to the food shelf at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church.
The pre-K "rainbow class" from Saxon Hill School in Jericho provided enthusiastic help digging up and cleaning off potatoes.
This year, the library grew Kennebec potatoes — which store well, according to Susan Adams.
Underhill couple Janice Solek-Tefft and Kenneth Tefft (who go by "J" and "K") weigh harvested potatoes before they're packed up for the food shelf. After less than an hour of volunteers digging and cleaning, J and K weighed over 200 pounds of potatoes.
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