Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

 

Autumn is maybe the season most asking for poetry, and during my joyful harvest work in the garden one or the other wonderful poem, especially by the German romantic poets, suddenly slips into my mind at this season. This is one of my English favourites from that era, so rich in images:

 

                Ode to Autumn  

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees;

Until they think warm days will never cease;

For summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.

 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a grainary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,

Droused with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press with patient look

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

 

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music, too,--

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river-sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn,

Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

                                                --John Keats

 

 

After the miserable, wet, mostly cool summer September surprised us with an unexpected gift: sunshine and warmth, mostly dry weather to bring in the harvest, and an outpouring of all the colours and scents the season at its best has to offer. It was as if we were to forget all the mud, drowned crops in field and garden, washed out roads and other miseries of the previous months, plus the difficult harvest conditions of the last few falls. Now, the end is in sight, only one field of canola remains standing, and with luck that, too, will be gone in a week or two; so far it still is not ripe enough to be cut. 

Photo courtesy of Courtney von Rennenkampff

Yes, on top of all the other good-weather news comes the fact that we still didn’t have a hard frost. A few mornings the grass and car windows were lightly frosted over, but the thermometer hardly dipped below the freezing mark. Whenever it threatened to do so I covered cucumbers and beans—not that they had much to lose--, zucchini and tomatoes, dahlias and all the flower pots, and finally one evening about two weeks ago when the frost warning from Environment Canada sounded a bit more serious, we picked all the tomatoes. They are now ripening in boxes under the bed in the spare bedroom, covered with newspapers. They could have remained on the vine, as it turned out later: the few tomatoes that had been hiding under leaves are still untouched by frost, and even new blossoms have appeared. I daresay they are overly optimistic, but it’s still nice to see. 

I’m still picking beans and strawberries, and the zucchini are not giving up yet either. Sweet peas add their bit to the tapestry with their purples, pinks, reds and whites, their deep fragrance calling me to stop and bend my head to the blossoms whenever I walk by. Yet the season is slowly taking its course: sunflowers are hanging heavy heads now, and not many are still blooming, so that bees and bumble bees convene in clusters on the remaining flowers while the chickadees and blue jays have started to fill their bellies from the ripened ones. 

As pitiful as some of the garden crops were, in particular potatoes and onions which suffered greatly during the summer from repeated submersion after yet another heavy rain, as abundant was the fruit harvest. Black currants were weighed down with clusters of berries the size of small grapes, and it’s a miracle that none of the branches broke off the apple trees. It’s fortunate that our three trees ripen at different times. The first and second have been picked clean for three weeks and ten days respectively, the apples from the third are still on the tree and will remain there until hard frost looms or they start falling; neither seems to threaten yet. Of course all these apples mean spending many hours processing them since especially the first batch won’t keep much longer than two or three more weeks. Apple sauce, apple butter, pie filling and several different kinds of cakes are filling freezer and shelves, and it is great to have a steady supply of apples to eat fresh no further away than the cold room in the basement. 

Huge flocks of cranes and snow geese moved over us for a couple of days about two weeks ago, and every evening Canada geese make a big ruckus when they return to their resting places after a day of gorging themselves on the stubble fields, preferably, I think, on peas. They will stick around for a while longer, as will ducks and hawks. Juncos, little transients we see only in spring and fall, flash their white tail feathers darting out of the drying perennials or between raspberry bushes. 

I know all this glory cannot last forever, though every autumn again I wish it did. All I can do, then, is to spend as much time as possible in the garden and among the trees, to appreciate it all, from the bejewelled spider web on a misty morning to the red harvest moon rising in the east these last few days, the constellations of summer making room for those of fall and winter, Orion and Taurus taking their designated spots.