The Garden after Zenith

The garden after the zenith of the summer, just before fall comes and takes everything, that’s my favourite garden. After one too many winds, the whole corn patch grows horizontally instead of the pious upright rows Little B and Pepperoni used as a hideout last week. And still there is fresh corn daily. The dill, arguably the best of all summer flowers, blooms in cheerful height up somewhere near my chin. 

The tomatoes languish in a huge wilting pile under the garden shed roof just there, keeping company with a mass of black beans, still on their vines, laying on an ancient bedspring awaiting processing. 

In preparation for The First Frost, Little B picks all the peppers off all the plants. Fruitless, in a stately if weedy row, they still grow valiantly against the September gloom. The parsley and basil are also in deep green denial that autumn is here. 

The overachieving zucchini is still zucchining. After having our fill of zucchini for the year we pick its massive overgrown fruit to use as somewhat grotesque fall decor, and still it keeps giving, more and more and more, and even the chickens are weary of eating zucchini for every meal. 

The cilantro, wild growing and abundant, blooms in all the places it shouldn’t. The bees and I take silly delight in its irreverence.

I point out the last red berries hiding in the tangled leaves of the strawberry plants and Little B is excited.

Pumpkins are growing fuller by the hour, the minis turning from yellow blooms to green babies to yellow adolescents to white beauties almost overnight. Mr Spaghetti Squash thinks that because he covers half the garden real estate, some of the grass around and also a few trellises, he now officially owns the place. How do I persuade him that I’m still boss ? I don’t want to offend him, because he inadvertently did a great job protecting the black beans and cabbages from weeds and I might need his descendants to do the same job next year. 

And speaking of attitude. The success of the broccoli has gone to its head. (Pun intended.) If I skip a day of picking it turns its stinky florets into saucy yellow flowers. She’s another over achiever. At this point, she’s standing taller than most of the corn. The more delicate cauliflowers in all their lavender beauty are unfortunately long eaten and all that’s left to remember them by are a stack of wilted green and purple leaves. I miss them. 

One mediocre red cabbage grows alone where used to be a lovely row of them. The deadly moths have gone for the year and seem to have taken the cabbage’s will to grow any bigger along with them. 

And I grow more melancholy as I write. But as a conclusion, I have to present the lettuce. 

I always grow too much lettuce but at the same time never enough. If there’s one thing I want to do better next garden season it’s successively planting lettuce all summer long. Right now I have no fresh lettuce but I still look lovingly at the old purple and green plants that are bitter, flowery and showing their age by refusing to stand up straight and tall and bushy as they did in their youth.  I haven’t spoken to them yet of my half formed uneducated hope to extract some of their seeds for next year’s lettuce crop. (The whimsical arugula flowers are coming to an end nearby and I actually have communicated with them my hope for some seeds.)

Honourable mention: 

1. the root vegetables. I adore you even if you’re not that pretty. 
2. the flowers. You are automatically the stars of the garden. You deserve your own page, one without the mention of practical things like vegetables. 
3. Anything else I failed to mention. spinach, feverfew. The voracious mint. Navy and green beans. My single Persian cucumber plant  -you are my pride and joy. Chives, rhuBarb, Raspberries. Celery. I’m sure there’s more of you. Even unmentioned, you are valuable and  loved for who you are.