Endings and Beginnings

Harvest season is in full swing.

The harvests I’m pulling now are opening new doors, charting new seasons. Saving seeds from dried zinnia blooms. Pulling in our bountiful borlotti bean harvests. Chopping down our mustard seed plant, curious how hard it will be to winnow the seeds. These harvests also signify the imminent closing of the frost-free growing season. With each week and each storage-friendly harvest, we leap ever closer to the dark weeks of late fall and our long winter’s nap.

The thoughts of fall and winter crept in during August when I saw how this scene embodied all the seasons — while it’s still full of life, it’s already set seeds and continues to do so. It was a reminder of the seeds I’d want to gather in September.

At the same time, we are mentally preparing ourselves for refrigerators devoid of fresh green beans and cucumbers (and summer squash if you haven’t ripped yours out like I did last month). We imagine a future when our countertops aren’t dotted with tomatoes of all shapes and sizes. We maybe are also realigning our schedule with the shift of the seasons, if we have school-aged children whose calendars have just reset. It’s no coincidence that September is the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah), harvest season of storage-friendly crops, and the start of a new {school} year. So much renewal this time of year.

For those of us who live for summer — I count myself as one of them — it can be terribly bittersweet to acknowledge and accept the end. I ride a seasonal high when school gets out in June and my days can be more carefree. I rejoice in the freedom of planting hot season crops and their promise of juicy foods that require weeks of unrelenting heat to grace our table. But the fear of the long, cold, and dark winter months and probability of slumping into seasonal depression can spike anticipatory anxiety in any season, but it’s particularly problematic this time of year.

But when we garden, we are given an opportunity to not only plant beyond the first frost (hello roots and hearty greens) but to also widen our gaze and reframe the seasons. Because within each season is a new season on the horizon. It’s so much more than just ripe produce. Some seasons are focused on external growth, growing plants and harvesting their fruits while others are focused on the harvest and the internal growth held within.

I chose these specific colors of gomphrena to blend together into a big wreath … someday.

I’m currently on a mission to harvest my everlasting flowers, mostly my gomphrena because I rarely get to my strawflowers in time. The gomphrena somehow managed to put out really long stems lately, and are screaming at me daily to clip, bundle, and hang to dry. I’ve wanted to make a gomphrena wreath for a while now, and maybe this is my season to make one. Or at least, to harvest enough to someday make a wreath.

Outside of the annual garden, I see so many wonderful prairie plants that have set seed too, seeds I can harvest, store, and gift, sharing a new season, a new plant relationship with others. Partridge pea is top on that list, an annual prairie plant that popped up in a corner of our garden after we remodeled in 2021. I have to time my harvests carefully as the seeds literally pop out of their leguminous pods, leaping several feet away, slowly increasing their range if the surrounding land accepts them. Our little bed of partridge pea has blossomed from a few plants to many square feet over the past two summers. It’s a delight, a bee haven, and a completely self-sufficient little native garden.

I see so much hope and renewal in fall, mixed right in with the death and decay. This ability to accept autumn as a season of new beginnings is one that took almost 20 years to realize. But it’s clear. This is a season of seeds.

Seeds are the beginning of new chapters, new gardens, new seasons.

Seeds hold entire gardens inside, just waiting for us to dream them up, and wait through the off season before tending them.