Starting To Wind Down The Garden

 This was a hard week, ending a hard month. This week was a particularly hard ending to September as we did a 54-hour door-to-door road trip to Mayo, sliced and diced so thin because of other equally (more?) pressing matters at home, including the Symphony. Oh, we made the trip all right, but I got spectacularly road-sick once we were back home, vomiting with such force that I ended up with a severely swollen face and a black eye.

I'm much better now.

It is the last Sunday in September and the eve of Rosh Hashanah, for which I am not spiritually ready in the least, and it is an intense spiritual holiday, opening the High Holy Days. So perhaps it was not all bad that I just came in from an hour in the garden, cleaning it up somewhat, checking what was going on (peppers now going strong, tomatoes on the wane) and, perhaps, showing some optimism myself in one of the garden tasks I accomplished.

The bees in the agastache 

The bees are still around and I caught a few in the agastache. They were far heavier in number earlier in the summer, usually so many that you could hear the plants hum. As Warren and I looked the bed over (cutting back on agastache bunch that had uprooted in the drought), I looked up at the tall ornamental grasses we had transplanted from a friend's giveaways. 

"Look."

The grasses have gone to seed and are beautiful in a new and different way.

The ornamental grass going to seed 

I picked tomatoes this morning, while Warren deadheaded the marigolds rimming two of the four sides of the garden. This late in the season, the marigolds in are full glory, blazing away, paying no heed to the coming autumn, seemingly impervious to the coming frosts and snows. As for the tomatoes, after I picked (and trimmed back and even pulled out one plant, done for the year), I ended up with a respectable load to share with my family's joint household here in town.

The basil got caught in the heat while we were out in Oregon and Washington, and never recovered. I'm glad I made pesto earlier in the season. I contemplated pulling it up, then figured that task could wait. 

We are clearly moving into the cooler days, with the sun moving along its fall course. With the cooler weather comes the hope of a fall crop of lettuce. So I spent a quiet half hour or so breaking up the dried soil in the planters, remixing the soil, and seeding it again. I'm going with the Black Seeded Simpson and Emerald Jewel for the fall, having found those the most enjoyable of the ones I tried this spring.

And maybe that's my optimism: seeding four planters in lettuce seed, hoping for a fall crop of salad, looking forward to what the autumn holds. 

One of four planters, seeded for salad

And perhaps my thoughts while I prepared the planters was some preparation for the High Holy Days.

The High Holy Days are a time of contemplation and self-assessment. It is a time for soul-searching. What did I accomplish last year? What were my biggest mistakes? What do I want to change for the coming year? What do I need to change in myself?

Mixing the soil, breaking up the clods, adding some plant food, watering it to the right consistency were all concrete tasks with fixed end points. My mind could wander through some of those more intense, personal thoughts: Where am I in my life? What does this year hold? Who am I now?

The Jewish sage Maimonides came to mind: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself only, then what am I? And if not now, when?"

And if not now, when?

Let me see what the New Year brings, both inside me and outside in the garden.