Kitchen Garden Journal

The End of the Season

The end of the season is always a slightly melancholy time. Fields and beds are cleared out and there's no new planting to replace them. Plants that have yielded faithfully slow their pace. Gone is the time for lush, exuberant growth. There is a perceptible turning inward as the plants begin to horde their energy and attempt, foolishly, to wait it out, looking more ragged with each successive frost. One by one the last tasks of the season are completed: spent crops harrowed in, fields seeded to rye, irrigation put away, garlic divided into cloves and planted for the following year.   

Then there's the nagging dread of the end of the abundance and inevitable return to the supermarket. Nostalgia for summer sets in as you remember that you never got around to making that raspberry tart. July and August are such a whirlwind that it's simply impossible to take full advantage of the wealth around you. And then it's gone. 22 short weeks--the New England summer a blast of fecundity rivaled in its sweetness only by its brevity. Now we, too, must turn inward, and wait it out.