Stephanie and Feral announced one day that the call had come in: a friend of theirs, maybe an hour or so away, had given us permission to glean their peach orchard.

Gleaning means to simply collect the fruits that have fallen to the ground following the initial harvest, and so we spent a focused few hours gathering the literal windfall of peaches that we found tucked into the grass about the trees.

We filled bin after bin, loading up the bed of Feral’s big old Dodge pickup, and stopped ourselves only because we got to a point where we had no idea what we would do with all these peaches (in Stephanie’s estimate, maybe four hundred pounds worth).

It was remarkable, and no one was happier than our resident fruit bat, Sylvie.  She loves fruit, and she double loves peaches, and here we were luxuriating in this forest of ambrosia, where there was quite literally no limit to the number of peaches she could eat.

Back at the farm, sorting through the hundreds and hundreds of peaches and trying to come up with a strategy to use them all, we began to jokingly refer to our situation as “peachmageddon”.  Then Feral dropped by with about fifty pounds of zucchinis and we began to talk about “zucchinimageddon” and then, over yet another abundant dinner that night (dessert: peach cobbler) I hit on the pun “farmageddon” and it stuck.

There was just so much good stuff coming to us from the earth that it was sometimes difficult for us to simply process it all.

There just aren’t a whole lot of opportunities to feel so connected to the food in front of us.

Another accidental, but enormously important lesson for the girls, and honestly, for me.

Pictures, in this case, are probably worth the thousand words they’re rumored to be, so I’ll let the gallery below do the talking:

Here we see the lovely Valerie, contemplating the bounty that awaits us, while Feral, Stephanie, and the big old Dodge lurk in the background.

Sylvie, seen here acting in her capacity as quality control.

Just three of the bins we had on every available surface of Stephanie’s kitchen.

Val and Stepanie sorting, washing, slicing, repeat.

Feral gets in on the act himself.

Fruits of our labor, literally.

What if I told you there were blackberry bushes everywhere?

Oh and also wild crabapples.

And fields of flowers.

Girls harvesting baskets of blossoms, a job they didn’t seem to mind at all.

And there’s also a lot of gorgeous, fresh garlic.

Feral’s hothouse was a source of some unlimited amount of tomatoes.

Air drying a batch.

Salad for dinner? Let’s see what’s ready.

Eggplants. Glorious.

Girls debating carrots or chard.

Sylvie and Arabella gathering fresh flowers.

Bunnies. A lot of bunnies. The girls went insane.

In order for Sylvie to understand the bunnies, she must first become one of the bunnies.

Aaand… the chicks. Five of the six pictured here, the other one I am sure is following me around and trying to get into the shower with me.