Harvesting to Try New Things

An late summer vegetable harvest.

I’ve been reading about end-of-season gardening rituals. Even though the first frost is a ways off, our early summer plantings in the raised beds at the bungalow are near the end of production. I feel such gratitude for this chance to play in garden patches with no real purpose in mind, and I want to mark this ending. In many traditions, the final harvests can include leaves, vines, even creeping tendrils from the likes of melons and squashes. Today, in addition to picking some of our last peppers and grape tomatoes, I harvested leaves from the pepper plants and green tomatoes for drying. I have my pepper leaves and tomatoes drying in the oven; I picked them this afternoon after the dew evaporated but before the afternoon rain shower. Can’t wait to see how they turn out.