Autumn arrives

Mornings are chilly. The lawn is covered with fallen leaves. The ridge behind the house gleams orange and gold, and the light has that distinctive slant and tone that highlights all the spiderwebs strung up between the tree limbs. It’s October!

The garden isn’t just yawning, now. It’s tucking itself in for a long rest.

I dug up the dahlia tubers after our first frost, which hit early (for us), in the second week of October. I divided the tubers, cleaned them of dirt, and packed them into reused plastic pots with woodchips. They’ll sleep through the winter in the garage, only coming out on one or two warm days to be dampened with the hose and allowed to dry again — merely to keep the tubers in that perfect stage between shriveled (too dry) and rotten (too wet). Next year, I’ll plant them out in the new cut flower beds we’ll be creating at the top of the hill over the winter. Joining them will be tulips, daffodils, lilies, zinnias, scabiosa, cannas, callas, and herbs, roses and a few other shrubs.

I gathered the last of the roselle just before the frost. The roselle grows so slowly that it doesn’t really start producing calyxes for harvest until September, so the early frost substantially shortened our harvest season. We lost three additional weeks of crops. In the end, I dried about a quart of roselle for tea. This coming year, I’ll plant more … but that’s what I always say.

We trucked in new mushroom compost for the cold frame in late September, and sowed seeds for spinach, winter lettuce, cabbage, beets, tatsoi, mizuna, radicchio, kale, mustard and swiss chard. The cold frame is the only garden “bed” that gets fresh soil each season — for the heat of fresh compost. That residual heat in the soil itself will keep the cold frame warmer for longer into the winter, giving the winter vegetables a boost they won’t get from a bed in the typical garden. In the spring, the cold frame will be slowly emptied. Its soil will be used to fill flower pots and seed trays and to top off other garden beds.

The late-sown seeds in the cold frame are slower to germinate than spring-sown seeds: commonly three weeks or more, compared to a week or two in the spring. This isn’t due to the cold, but to the falling light levels. Seeds are triggered by light, and in the fall it takes them longer to reach their prerequisite level to trigger sprouting. Slowly, though, the plants are coming along. They’ll spend the winter in the cold frame, kept open for ventilation as much as possible, and closed only against the worst of the weather. The vegetables will be ready to harvest in early 2023 — after the earlier sown vegetables, out in the normal garden beds, have already been harvested.

I harvested Kentucky Wonder beans as snap beans, or green beans. I saved enough beans for seed to last me several years, or to share with friends. I also harvested Trail of Tears beans — a dried black bean — just before the frost. I’ll have about a pound of dried beans, which is not quite as many as I’d hoped to have. Again, that early frost cut into my plans.

Next year I intend to plant the beans on the third terrace, in heavily amended soil. I’ll be able to grow three times as many up there, and my hope is that the nitrogen that beans store in nodules on their roots will benefit the soil once the plants are left to die at the end of the season.

The third terrace soil is improving … which I know because it grew a truly atrocious crop of weeds this year. That doesn’t sound like a good thing, but it is. Just two years ago, that soil was so poor that nothing would grow on it. Not even the toughest, hardiest weed. After two years of intensive mulching with plant materials, leaves, wood chips and mushroom compost, it is turning a corner. I’ll have to dig it over again this autumn — pulling out and burning every scrap of couch grass and perennial weeds. I’ll lay down thick layers of leaves, cardboard, and wood mulch, probably about 10 inches thick.

Inside the house, succulents and tender ferns are at home on the south-facing window seats, alongside winter squash finishing their ripening in the sun. The pantry shelves are loaded with tomato sauce, ketchup, barbecue sauce, sweet & sour sauce, jams and jellies, and pickles of all kinds — as well as dried beans, herbs, fruits, flowers, and tea blends. The freezer is filled with cabbage rolls, challah and sourdough loaves, pesto, beans, corn, grated squash and zucchini, roasted peppers, and sliced apples and peaches. This is the time of year when the rush of harvest and preservation in August and September is worth it, when I can throw together a meal in minutes. As Barbara Kingsolver has said in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, all of this fresh, healthy harvest is fast food prepared in advance.