September Garden Advice

The season of vanishings

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For the last three weeks, Eastern Massachusetts has been performing a trick it hasn’t pulled off in ten years: an entire stretch of August and early September sauntering on at an airy, somnambulant seventy-five degrees by day, dipping conscientiously into the fifties by night. Coupled with buffeting salty air and a sky that ripens from powder to lapis come evening, it makes the coast north of Boston feel like a half-dreamed stretch of the Aegean. One of the supposed virtues of living in New England is that you have to tolerate everything, so it’s a rare gift when our normally fetid late summer atmosphere decides to be so obliging, and the nights smell like cool water, salt hay, and wild grapes.

Over Labor Day weekend, my family and I took a walk southward along the scrubbed white blade of Plum Island beach, a bird-haunted island where there’s more driftwood than people. Sandpipers prized out and disemboweled little jewel-colored mollusks from the bubbling sand, blotched crabs scuttled from ravening battalions of gulls, and the sea grass was red in the angling light. By the time we got home to sit with books on the porch and heat up the grill, it was nearly evening, and with a shock I noticed a conspicuous absence: the chimney swifts were gone. Those ugly, dun-colored, cigar-shaped visitors whose piping song is the general background to summer here, who roil and squabble in the air each night as they go to roost in a thousand dirty colonial chimneys, had left by silent consent with the turning of the month. Semtember is, indeed, the season of vanishings: the last almost-rotten tomato, the final mildewed black-eyed susans, the end of sunscreen-scented days and the promise of the killing frosts. Later that same evening, as I clipped a few side-buds from the dahalias I found a field mouse lying dead under the purple-silver shadow of some catmint. It had no wounds, no poison-indicating foam at the lips. It had simply ended, as finally as summer.

But before summer is gone, you still have a few things to do in the garden:

1/ Harvest and Cut Off Tomato Plants

Depending on the year, tomatoes can vanish in September or hold out until early November. It all has to do with the relative heat of the daytime temperatures. If things are hot and sunny, the plant will stay fairly productive if it’s evenly watered and occasionally fertalized. Around here, the prevailing early cool has turned them all into twisted, green-gray, withlike things with the occasional red eye glaring morbidly through the vetch. I’m holding out just a bit longer to see if I can squeeze a little more fruit out of them, but their time is very clearly near. When they’re done, I’ll ignore the deceptive promise of the remaining underripe fruit and hack the whole mildewed mess off just above the ground, leaving the roots to bleed and rot overwinter, fertalizing the soil. Next year I’ll rip them out, till in a little compost, and plant something else there, keeping up a light rotation. Whatever you do with that last tomato, make it good. It’s a thing that calls for a little savagery and a little ceremony.

2/ Resist Buying Mums…Or Don’t

The garden stores are now full of mums, always touted for their hardiness. But mums are only hardy in one direction: they laugh at frost and a bite that kills other flowers will only improve their color, but dry heat will mummify them. If you break down like I did and buy them too early, just understand that you’re committing to a lot of watering. They’ll need plenty of water every day and fertilizer once a week to stay productive into the season when we actually want them, namely Haloween and Thanksgiving, and even with the most lavish attention they will sometimes die inexplicably after one hot early-October day, as if they had some unknown heart condition. If this happens, just go get another one, preferably in a complimentary color.

3/ Let Winter Squash Ripen

I began this month with almost two dozen butternut squash ripening in the Classical Roots Vegitable Garden, only to walk in one day and discover that more than half had been whisked away by idealistic faculty before their time. The upshot of this will be a gross culinary experience for the presumptuous: the skin will be almost impossible to peel, the flesh will refuse to roast, and the inner cavity will be coiled with putrid half-developed seed. It’s a sad case, but probably all too common for gardeners like me, who tend to cook very ambitiously autumnal meals as soon as the weather becomes even remotely temperate. I might venture to call it the Pumpkin Spice Latte Effect (TM). But if you have winter squash growing at home or in your community garden, resist the temptation to harvest until a jabbed fingernail can no longer pierce the flesh, and the rest of the plant has nearly wilted away into dessicated umbilicals. Only then, after the plant has given every speck of sugar to the fruit, should you pick the squash, which will keep in a cool dry place for weeks, though I imagine they won’t last that long.

4/ Go After Some Mushrooms

After my foray into Chantrelles, I branched out into Black Trumpet mushrooms, whose clovy, truffly bitterness turned a sauce I was cooking into an otherworldly earth-toned brew. At some point this month, venture out with a good guide book or an experienced friend and give mushroom foraging a try. The woods at the moment are at the balance point between extension and rot, and the mushroom is the paradoxical child of both. That creation should crown itself with deliciousness at this moment is a sign that God has a sense of rightness, humor, and timing. Don’t miss the chance to enjoy the joke.

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