Today is the autumnal equinox: the day the hours of light and dark are once again in balance before descending into increasing darkness. I’ve felt the change coming, and as usual it makes me unsettled and a bit melancholy. Typically I don’t do well with this time of year; it’s a beautiful time, the light has this crisp, high contrast quality to it, and the turning leaves are so pretty, but I hate to see everything dying off, and I know that winter is coming. I don’t deal well with either change or death, and autumn is all about both.

A sampling of the bounty our garden has produced this year

It’s been almost a month since the above photo was taken and the harvest has mostly tapered off. The peppers are just now in full swing but it’s tough getting to them before the crickets do – they chew holes in them and then crawl inside…yuck. The tomatoes are still trying valiantly to produce, but we’ve had some cool wet weather and the big ones are tending to rot before they can ripen. The leaves have some sort of ick on them and there are whiteflies and caterpillars moving in on the weakened plants. I prune away the bad stuff as I pick the tomatoes — I just can’t bring myself to chop down all the vines that are full of flowers and ripening fruit — but I suspect there is a balance that is reached where the amount of viable produce vs. the amount of work and mess is no longer worthwhile, and I wonder if allowing the plants to continue is possibly even counterproductive; am I letting disease and pests get a good foothold so that I’ll have to fight them twice as early next year?

I hate being in the position of deciding who dies and when… for that reason I’ve always coped better with crops where I am harvesting fruits and vegetables the plants produce rather than the plants themselves, and have shied away from growing things like cabbage or radishes. While I perfectly understand, on an intellectual level, that my overly sentimental attitude is counterproductive, I can’t help it…  though I imagine that if I ever did have to live off the land, I’d have to toughen up quick – or starve.

The one thing that fall has going for it this year is that I am really worn out with tending the garden. Some crops did very well this year, (that beastly cherry tomato vine!) others had issues, but produced decently (the squash, the peppers) and a few were a complete bust (we got exactly three strawberries and a chipmunk stole the best one, the cantaloupe plants never fruited) but it’s been a lot of daily work making sure that as much of the harvest as possible is not wasted. I’ve got a half dozen assorted winter squash sitting in the bottom of the pantry, three bags of frozen butternut gnocchi, two loaves of frozen zucchini bread, and lots of frozen tomatoes, tomato sauce, and pizza sauce. I even canned six jars of jalapeno jelly. There have been a lot of days where I came home from work and then spent all of my hours until bedtime picking, cleaning, processing, or cooking; it will be a relief to have this time back for other pursuits.

Two months ago, we planted four tomato plants in our raised beds

…and now we have THIS.

Seriously, you could hide a mid-size sedan in this mess. In fact, if you look close, you will see someone has.

There is a purple Cherokee, a Costoluto Genovese, and a pineapple, but most of what you are looking at is the devil beast known as Matt’s Wild Cherry.  I calculated today that it’s covering about a hundred square feet at this point.

It has engulfed the other three tomatoes, the mugwort, and the wormwood. It’s heading for the highway…

… and it’s over my head.

I have to crawl through a jungle of vines to get the tomatoes, which it produces at a very fast rate:

But wow! These are the best tasting little tomatoes, ever. We will definitely grow this variety again – but not near anything else.