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Peeping season: The sights and sounds of fall harvests in Vermont

Vermont Public | By Sophie Stephens,

Zoe McDonald, Elodie Reed

Published October 17, 2024 at 5:00 AM EDT

A collage of three photos. The largest one on the left side shows red apples in a bucket. On the top right, and image of one brown and one white alpaca. On the bottom right, an image of an adult and a child digging into brown dirt with shovels. — Vermont Public staffers celebrated the fall season — and the year of the camelids — at a wool spinning class, apple orchard and potato plot.

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

In the background, a bright blue sky and multi-colored tree coverage. In the foreground, several white tents are lined up, and several people stand around talking. — 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 shaggy, white goats are enclosed in a green fence. They face away from the camera and towards two people looking towards them. The goat on the right is standing tall, the middle one is a bit lower, and the one on the left stands shortest. Several people are in the background. — Three Angora goats greet visitors at the festival's Animal Barn on Oct. 6, 2024. Angora goats produce fleece used to make mohair yarn.

A smaller brown alpaca stands on the left and looks to the right, and a larger white alpaca stands on the right and looks forward. They both have black traps around their nose. — 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.

Several semi-opaque plastic bags sit open, containing large amounts of black and cream-colored curly fiber. — 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.)

Looking from above and over the shoulder, a woman with light blond hair in two buns wearing a purple shirt holds white fiber in her hands and feeds it through a light-wood colored wheel that's spinning. — 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."

A cylinder with two circles on it's end is suspended sideways and moves. In the center, gray yarn wraps around. — Freshly spun fiber wraps around the bobbin, a part of a spinning wheel that rotates.

A close up of two hands a few inches apart hold a light-colored yarn. There is a gold ring on the person's left thumb, and they are wearing a gray and black knit sweater with an alpaca design on it. — A person feeds fiber between two hands to create tension as they spin on a foot pedal-powered wheel.

Bundles of yarn are lined up on wooden shelves on two sides of a beam. In the top left: light yellow, yellow and light green. In the top right: dark red, dark purple and dark green. In the bottom right: blue, dark blue and navy blue. In the bottom left: Coral, dusty blue and bright blue. — 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

A tree limb with small, round, golden pears is in the foreground of a landscape showing an orchard with a lake and mountains in the far distance on a cloudy day. — 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.

Two red and green apples covered in droplets of water hang next to each other from a tree branch. — 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.

A hand picks a yellow and red apple off a tree covered in small green leaves. — The orchard hosts visitors for pick-your-own experiences, but the real action happens away from the pick-your-own rows.

Workers, some standing on ladders and others on the ground, pick apples from two rows of trees. In the distance is a tractor with crates of apples attached to the back. — 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.

A basket full of apples hangs from a person's torso. — With double-ended baskets slung over their fronts, the workers set up tall ladders and work their way down the trees, picking ripe apples.

A Jamaican man in a hat and blue shirt places apples in a basket slung over his torso while looking at the tree in front of him. — 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.

Apples pour out of the green fabric bottom of a two-ended basket into a wooden crate filled with more apples. — 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.

A Jamaican man with a basket of apples suspended on the front of his body smiles, while holding some apples in his hands. — 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 metal stand holds rows of delicious-looking apple pies. — 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"

A photo of many people of all ages including very young children in a soil plot, against a background of mountains and a grassy field. One small child in an aqua shirt and rainboots is running over to a black bucket with potatoes in hand. Sunlight backlights everyone. — 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.

A photo of a person's arms full of potatoes. The person is wearing latex gloves, a watch and a blue sweatshirt with sleeves rolled up to reveal tanned arms. In the background is green grass. — Ann Squires carries a fresh armload of potatoes over for cleaning.

A photo of an adult man pulling up weed-like potato greens from a garden plot behind a young child sticking a shovel into the soil. The pair are sort of mirroring one another -- one foot forward, one foot back, both in baseball caps and both bent over. — Jericho resident Geoff Cole, left, pulls up potato greens with a helper from Saxon Hill School's pre-K "rainbow class."

A photo of a woman sitting on a blue tarp, holding a potato in a white cloth. There are adults and children scattered around, and everyone is on a green field with a school building in the background. — 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.

A photo looking down at a little girl wearing red and white barrettes in her hair. She's holding a black bucket with potatoes in the bottom, and in front of her is a blue tarp filled with more potatoes. — 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.

A photo of a black bucket filled with dirt-covered potatoes, seen from above looking down. It's sitting on the ground, which has some woodchips and greens on it. A child's legs stand behind the bucket, with an out-of-focus hand poised over the potatoes, as if having just let go of a potato. — The pre-K "rainbow class" from Saxon Hill School in Jericho provided enthusiastic help digging up and cleaning off potatoes.

Elodie Reed

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Vermont Public

This year, the library grew Kennebec potatoes — which store well, according to Susan Adams.

A photo of a woman in a red shirt and floppy woven hat and a man in a green shirt reading I am vermont strong. Both are holding a heavy floral bag on the hook of a hanging scale. — 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.

Have questions, comments or tips? Send us a message.

Corrected: October 17, 2024 at 8:38 AM EDT

This story has been updated with the correct spelling for the Deborah Rawson Memorial Library.

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New England News Collaborative

Sophie Stephens

See stories by Sophie Stephens

Zoe McDonald

Zoe McDonald is a digital producer in Vermont Public’s newsroom. Previously, she served as the multimedia news producer for WBHM, central Alabama’s local public radio station. Before she discovered her love for public media, she created content for brands like Insider, Southern Living and Health. She graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Mississippi in 2017. Zoe enjoys reading, drinking tea, trying new recipes and hiking with her dog.

See stories by Zoe McDonald

Elodie Reed

Elodie is a reporter and producer for Vermont Public. She previously worked as a multimedia journalist at the Concord Monitor, the St. Albans Messenger and the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, and she's freelanced for The Atlantic, the Christian Science Monitor, the Berkshire Eagle and the Bennington Banner. In 2019, she earned her MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Southern New Hampshire University.

See stories by Elodie Reed

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