A glowering sky, a stiff breeze, and plummeting temperatures brought an early look at what was to come. |
Clear skies soon returned, which meant glorious Indian summer afternoons but also frost and serious trouble for tender tomatoes and peppers. |
Attempting to stave off veggie decline is kinda like plastic surgery for the garden. You know that the annual plants that so recently vibrated with life and glory are soon-to-be-goners. They're fading into twisted vines and dusky crumbles, and within a couple months will have disintegrated into compost to live again as nutrients for next year's garden—small comfort as they face the inevitable. But still, in the fall, you try to save them with props and denial.
This may be a stretch, but I see something similar happening with my peers as we too dry into dusky crumbles. We have the major props going on, and I am not above hair dye and serious exercise, but I have to say. Why bother? (2016 update. I still bother!)
What's going to happen is inescapable. Gardens are teachers. They are life on the fast track.
For most of my garden friends, it's eight or nine months max, start to finish. We gardeners see all these beings through from their astonishing emergence from seeds in February and March to lusty water-drinking sun-soaking life hounds in July and August to dying dogs tripping on their tongues in late September and October. Check out these I'm-going-to-live-forever-sunflowers in July, then on their last legs in mid-October.
We're so beautiful! they seem to shout with all that July color and drama. |
Same beings a few months later. Sad, yes? But that's life. |
Then into the garden refuse heap awaiting the grinder and, finally, the garden, where they're tossed onto rows to decompose over the winter. Could they even imagine such a thing back in July? |
2016 update
Now watching spinach and lettuce emerge in the cold frame, eagerly searching for light.
Late fall has arrived, but in true optimist fashion, I think that winter will be a long time coming. I'm looking forward to seeing the spinach finally emerge and enjoying a tender salad of winter greens come March.
Nice. I guess if you're August, I'm late July! Great photo of the sunflowers.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I'm not August. But maybe late September.
DeleteProps and denial. Yep. Very poignant piece for me at the moment. Sometimes we think we're at September and a sudden frost knocks us into what feel like late November. Being a gardener, of course I related heavily to the literal as well as the figurative elements in this wonderful piece.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Grace. Love you.
ReplyDelete