This week the Gazette worked with Visit the County on this, the Fall Countylicious Special Issue. In addition to a centerspread map of the island with miniature drawings of all the restaurants by Evert Rosales, the editorial team fanned out across the County to learn how farm-to-table dining actually works. We look forward to featuring our interviews over the four weeks of Countylicious.

We spoke with the chefs and the farmers and gardeners who grow the vegetables, flowers, microgreens, and mushrooms that will be on the menu during this special, and specially local, festival. It’s not a secret that Countylicious is enjoyed most by those who live here and nearby, in Kingston, Stirling, or Brighton. The County boasts a long, slow, warm fall that beckons to those in the know. 

That said, hoarding up the harvest, racing against “the frost deadline” to gather it, and studying how to keep it across the winter, was a major theme. As Sarah Soetens, of Flame and Smith, said of her efforts to can and store and keep, “it’s just like the olden days.”

One of the striking things we learned was how restaurants  collaborate on the harvest — the chefs at Bocado and at Gather told of special lettuces, fancy microgreens and edible flowers cultivated just for them. More often than not, though, what’s on the menu is whatever comes with the season, the weather, and that day’s pickings. 

In a conversation we feature next week, Chef Justin Tse at Gather, the new restaurant at Wander, described the realities of farm-to-table cooking: the sheer volume of patrons and quantities, the expense, the short season, and the need to harvest and store produce before a very hard deadline: winter. “We are so busy, the summer season is so short, we are always struggling to beat the frost deadline.”

A chef is a hoarder; finding ways to store up the harvest requires invention, time, and space. Mr. Tse just acquired two new industrial freezers, each the size of a large dining table. He fills these with vacuum-sealed corn. It will taste fresh six months from now. Herbs are dried and powdered and turned into oils. Peppers get made into hot sauces and vinegars. Basil is bagged and frozen, as are rhubarb, strawberries, blueberries, and Niagara peaches, also made into jams and chutneys. Apples become pie filling.

Behind it all, orchestrating this careful dance of the seasons, from field to harvest, to cellar or freezer, to stove, to table, is Vicki Emlaw. She comes up over and over again, this magical figure of the heirloom tomato, Napa cabbage, and runner bean. She seems to supply every restaurant in the County all summer long. Chefs around the island include a run to Vicki’s in the mornings, while she texts updates on the harvest to their cell phones. How does she manage such vast quantities, I wonder. As Jason Parks tells us in his story, Bounty of the County, Vicki’s Morrison Point Road “farm” is two acres, two cold frames, and two greenhouses. 

If you are curious about what will be on the menu this season, visit her roadside stand. This tiny shed — maybe 10 x 12? at most? — opens up, once you step inside, into a general store. It has bread, cheese and cream cheese, fresh lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, beets, canned fish and shellfish of every variety, frozen meats, joints, and bones for stews, cucamelons and flowers, butters, jams, oils, and, my favourite, containers of frozen pesto all year round, a meal’s worth is a bargain. Every time I reach for a stack of the frozen variety, to do some hoarding of my own, Vicki, who is somehow always there replenishing the stock, looks sad. “There’s fresh pesto right here,” she says, pointing to a refrigerator. Once she handed me a bunch of basil and pleaded with me to learn how to make my own. “It’s so simple.” 

Fall is the most beautiful time of year here, I insist. The late harvest butternuts still overflow at Hagerman’s and Laundry’s and at every roadside stand, along with pumpkins and apples and corn and beets. Tomatoes and peppers continue all the way to the end of October, here in the warm County. Along the fields and roads, massive black walnuts drop heavily to the ground, on special order for the squirrels and chipmunks. Wild purple grapes trail everywhere. The deep pink of hydrangeas and roses still blooming, the late September raspberries, such a wonder for someone from Ottawa — or Montreal. 

Let us remember all this in winter. When the skies are dark from early afternoon to late morning. When it is bitterly cold and there’s a stiff wind. When the snow and the ice have melded together, making even a walk a treacherous chore. Remember these kitchens and candlelit dining rooms. The glint of the silverware and the deep red of good wine. The warmth of a fire. And the stores of a harvest long gone by. Apples in burlap sacks safe in cold cellars. Sauces and chutneys in rows of glass jars. Apple and strawberry and peach. Remember the freezers piled high with fresh frozen corn. The dried herbs kept safe in oils and powders and pestos. And last but not least, the flowers, violets and nasturtiums and sunflower shoots, safe in glass houses, waiting in deep winter, waiting for you.