Seth Pascoe conducts a straw poll on attitudes to harvest

The Oxford Online English Dictionary defines harvest as: “The process or period of gathering in crops.” But what does it mean to others?

This month I conducted a small poll. Using the wonders of social networking, I asked the question; “What’s the first thing you think of when I say the word harvest?”

Top of the list was: “Harvest is the only time of the year that my banker sounds sincere when he asks me how things are going.” This was followed by “too many bloody tractors going slowly down the road and causing traffic jams” and “when you check the weather forecast and then re-check it immediately; just to confirm what you saw, and your sanity.”

Other entries included:

• Putting in the hours to fund a semester’s worth of beer at Cirencester

• That’s when my mobile phone bill resembles the gross domestic product of a small country

• Harvest is when I decide whether I like my agronomist or not

• Reaping the rewards (hopefully)

• The culmination of a season’s hard work

• When there never seems to be enough hours in the day

• Harvest? Well I usually forget what my husband looks like and he only recognises me as the fetcher of spare parts

• It’s what it’s all about, it’s why we’re farmers

• Potatoes: When the soil reveals what it’s been hiding all season long

• Machinery: one day you are singing its praises, the next you’re swearing at it

• Well, it’s when you sort of lose touch with reality. All you’re focused on is finishing the field, the next one and the one after that.

• Scarecrows. Is that weird? Why, what did everyone else say?

I tried to include a few answers from those outside the world of farming. More perceptive readers might be able to determine which they are. As for myself, harvest provides all the answers to a season’s worth of decision making. Oh and the promise of a cold beer after a long day.