Weather matters, don't you think?

Harvested October 17, 2011.  Latest garden harvest in memory.
A mess of green beans is already in the pan.

I was so wrong in my last post. It was a childish reaction to just two days of winter-like weather that I believed meant the end of the garden, and especially, tomatoes! How foolish, how unbelieving, how premature! The past several days have been gloriously summer-like, and the forecast is for more of the same. PK and I have been in a frenzy of picking and processing apples, dismantling the summer garden, preparing for winter, and, most amazingly, continuing to harvest tomatoes, zukes, peppers, flowers, and berries as late fall has turned summer-like. A bowl of strawberries in mid-October? No way!

It was 34 degrees this morning, but 80-plus this afternoon. The tomatoes that were green a few days ago are ripening, and peppers continue to color. What an amazing October! Two winter-like days last week hit us with what we know is just around the bend—dreadful dark and wet. But for now we're wearing shorts and sunglasses. Last night it was 68 degrees at 9 p.m. On October 16!

Weather matters. Have you noticed? When conversation slips into weather territory, we may think, How trivial. How challenged we are to come up with meaningful discourse that we stoop to discussing the temperature and humidity. But weather may be the single most important element of our daily lives. I'm sure the Weather Channel would agree, as would people who work, exercise, garden, farm, or live outdoors. Or those who are subject, as I believe most of us are, to seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Even my mother, who rarely gets outside, can see through her apartment window overlooking the fair city of Rogue River, Oregon, whether it is fair or foul. The light comes in, dim or bright. Somehow, it matters to her. It matters to me, for sure. Long live the light! And when it is gone, any minute now, I will remember and long for its return.

So long, tomatoes. I'll miss you!

October tomatoes. Pitiful!

This sorry batch is now cooking as the last marinara sauce of the season. 

The annual garden shutdown is a woeful certainty. We haven't had a frost yet, so the cold-sensitive plants haven't blackened and gone into final meltdown. Those plants would be, in order of their intolerance of cold: basil, zukes, peppers and tomatoes. With the exception of the peppers, they are all behaving badly, cranky in their old age with curling leaves, refusal to grow, and developing age spots like crazy, as if to say, Let's get it over with! 

Me too, especially as far as food preservation goes. However, I absolutely mourn garden-fresh tomatoes once ours are gone because I know it will be at least 10 months!! before we'll have them again. I always break down in the spring and sneak a store tomato into a salad. I can fool myself into believing that it grew somewhere hot and will taste like a tomato. But it never does, and PK can't refrain from curtly observing that I've once again weakened. I promise never to purchase a commercial tomato that must have been picked green, "ripened" in a chemical fog, shipped for thousands of miles, and is exorbitantly overpriced. Hard tomatoes, I've learned, are inedible, even if they're blushing red.

This is how our tomatoes looked in mid September. Perfect. 

We'll have to make do with the quarts of canned tomatoes and salsas and jars of dried ones in the pantry, plus bags and bags of marinara and salsas in the freezer. It will be tough, but I know we're up to the challenge. Goodbye to a great garden season. (With a fond nod to the much-smaller fall/winter garden coming soon.)