September Hurries By

Autumnal Equinox and Harvest Update in Photos

Autumnal Equinox

Tomorrow, the light of day and the dark of night will be of equal length. The Autumn Equinox marks the midpoint of harvest season for the Northern Hemisphere. More prosaically, printed on our (Gregorian) calendars, it will be the First Day of Fall. The dark night hours will then outlast the daylight until the Winter Solstice on December 21. Our eldest daughter was born 20 years ago at the exact moment of the Equinox, after an exceedingly long and difficult labor. That moment coincided with shift change for the labor & delivery nurses. My neat and thoughtful birth plan had long since been shredded and tossed aside. Apparently we needed much foreshadowing that parenting would not be an easy endeavor. The experience of her birth essentially announced: Prepare for nothing to go as planned, for everything to require sweat and ingenuity, for accepting joy in the midst of pain and chaos.

Busy Bees

Our bees started out very busy this month. Busy being robbed, that is. Our smaller hive had their honey stores decimated, by thieving bees that looked suspiciously like our bees who swarmed last summer, and lost their queen to complete the ignominy. Our larger hive has been robust in defending itself against all would-be intruders, building up honey stores, and keeping their laying queen. So Phillip combined the two colonies back into one, a new attempt for us that has thankfully been successful.

Combining hives. The smaller, weaker colony to be “trapped” in the top box. Paper separating them from the larger colony they are joining. By the time that bees from both colonies make an opening in the paper, their pheromones have mixed, so they recognize each other as belonging to the same colony.

We had purposefully planted many late-blooming plants around our property, and our reward for this is seeing happy little bee bottoms poking out from the flowers as they forage. The overall seasonal foraging opportunities have dwindled, though, so we are feeding the hive supplemental sugar water daily.

Honeybees on native purple asters, AKA Michaelmas daisies

What We’re Harvesting:

Top (L to R): tomatoes, more tomatoes, goji berries; Middle (L to R): beans, carrots, corn; Bottom (L to R): elderberries, more elderberries, lemon balm

This was our first successful year growing carrots! The raised beds with looser soil + compost seemed to make all the difference.

Top (L to R): peaches, watermelon, sunflower with bumblebees; Middle (L to R): sorghum from bird feeder, making apple-pear crisp (pears from our tree & apples from a friend's backyard tree), fruit crisp a la mode; Bottom (L to R): another wee melon, hot peppers, pumpkin

Typical state of the kitchen table in September, including herbs to be dried and seeds to save.

More blossoms for the flower-lovers:

Top: (L to R): autumn crocus, globe amaranth, echinacea w/ bumble; Middle (L to R): Joe-pye weed, cosmos, hydrangea; Bottom (L to R): tickseed, azure asters, borage

Further Afield

It’s been a busy month beyond the harvesting and preserving. We travelled out of town for our niece’s wedding and the memorial for Phillip’s mom. The start to the school year has no chill, of course. We have a kid in marching band, so high school football games are a thing. Our youngest nailed her audition for the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. We’re thankful for Phillip’s brother, who helped us with renovating the basement bathroom that had water damage. We’re still planning for a new roof this Fall. This weekend brings a funeral for a long-time family friend, one of the most generous and hospitable men I’ve ever known.

During our time away, we got to experience some fantastic gardens. We stayed with dear friends who have made amazing use of their city corner lot, to grow native and food-producing plants. We walked to Mass from their house, past multiple homes with similar front yard gardens, to find that the parish had also planted a gorgeous garden behind the church. We drove home from Phillip’s sister’s with gifts of plants in the trunk; she and her husband have created a huge garden in their suburban back yard. They’ve maintained the expected lawn and landscaping at the front of the house, so their backyard garden, fish pond, and rabbit hutches aren’t visible from the curb. Our brother-in-law was canning when we arrived— the perfect welcome! They’ll be visiting soon, so we can continue the plant swap.

Gate into our home victory garden, with the Littlest Cornfield in the background

Happy Fall/ Happy Autumn to the Northern Hemisphere readers! Good Yom Kippur and Sukkot to those who observe! Do you enjoy this change of seasons? How has your September been? What are you harvesting, and how are you cooking/ baking/ preserving what you’ve grown? Does this time of year get you thinking about the passage of time? Birth, life, death, all that? And please do let us know: what is your favorite Autumn drink? (Survey below, active for 1 week)

—Erin, in Michigan