Summer is Officially Over

End of Summer Harvest - photo by Rick Jackofsky

I am officially declaring today the end of summer. I know it was really over a couple weeks ago, but I have my own seasonal indicators that don't always match up with the calendar or solar year. One of my seasonal markers is that the first weekend in October is our cut off date to accept an outdoor gig (at least north of the Mason Dixon line) and yesterday we did our final outdoor show of 2014 at the Long Island Fair in Old Bethpage, NY. We were blessed with a beautiful "Indian summer" day and we got to share a stage with Paticia Shih and a very entertaining team of jugglers. By the end of the day, as the sun got low (summer's over!), the temperature was beginning to drop. After the show we went home, changed into some warm clothes, enjoyed a hot meal, and listened to a baseball playoff game on the radio (another sign summer is winding down). Then, at some point during the night, the heat kicked on; at that point I knew summer was indeed over. So now that I am resigned to the fact that fall has arrived, I decided today was a good day to pull my tomatoes and eggplants out of the garden. I picked three almost ripe Brandywine tomatoes, three small white eggplants, some ripe cherry tomatoes, and a bunch of green tomatoes. The big green tomatoes will be wrapped in newspaper and put in a brown paper bag to ripen. The green cherry tomatoes were put into an airlocked fermentation jar along with some green beans, garlic, pepper, a horseradish leaf (the horseradish leaf provides tannic acid which keeps the pickles crisp), and a brine solution to be enjoyed in the coming weeks. The maple leaves are starting to fall, which, as you may know, tends to happen once summer is over. Soon I'll start raking those leaves to begin a new round of composting while I prepare my garlic beds. In a month I will be digging up my horseradish and planting my garlic while I start thinking about maple sugaring and pea planting, two of my signs that winter is over.

Time to start "Praying for Spring"???