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Seeing October in a new light
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By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, September 20, 2007 in The Washington Post
When T.S. Eliot wrote "April is the cruelest month," he might have added, "October is seriously underrated."
Consider those two months. We expect from both a temperature range midway between hot and cold, with unpredictable doses of either. But gardeners, especially, embrace April with exaggerated hope and cheer, oblivious to the imminent onset of blistering heat, drought and bolted lettuce. By October many edge wearily and even gratefully into the shadow of oncoming winter, forgetting to enjoy the gardening year's best weather.
Poke your head outside the cocoon of artificial lighting and controlled indoor temperature, and you'll better understand the rhythm of the seasons' lag time, a planetary dance in which reality and symbol rarely mesh. What we call summer solstice (around June 21) runs about two months ahead of the year's hottest weather, and the winter solstice (around Dec. 21) two months ahead of its coldest. "As the days begin to lengthen, the cold begins to strengthen," the old saying goes.
The number of daylight hours on the spring equinox (around March 21) is the same as that on the fall equinox (around Sept. 22), but while the sun in March seems feeble, in September it feels strong, thanks to the slowness with which the earth absorbs and releases the sun's heat. In spring the warming of the soil surface can lag a month and a half behind that of the air on a mild day, and six feet below, the lag can be as much as three months. In fall, the ground is comparably slow to chill.
This all adds up to fall gardening nirvana. The earth is still warm, even if you start the day with a thick sweater. Pest insects are bundling themselves up in pupae to hibernate or seeking refuge underground. The shortening days let you get away with feats impossible in spring. Lettuce and spinach, whose impulse to go to seed is triggered by lengthening days, do not bolt cruelly, but bide their time, allowing a gloriously long harvest. Arugula loses its harsh bite. Carrots, beets, turnips, parsnips and Brussels sprouts begin the magical sweetening-up that comes with the cold.
As maples turn scarlet, Tuscan kale glows with the deep green of chlorophyll. By the time such summer crops as tomatoes, cucumbers and melons have frozen or lost their flavor, far more crops have reached the perfect moment. You're then ready to compost all those tired vines and embrace the garden's benign season.
Article copyright of Barbara Damrosch. Reprinted with permission.
Photo credit: Veronica Lynn
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Interview with food writer Nancy Harmon Jenkins
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Food writer Nancy Harmon Jenkins has established herself as one of the authoritative voices on Mediterranean cuisine. She has lived and traveled extensively within the region and divides her time between homes in Maine and Tuscany. We recently caught up with her to talk with her latest book Cucina del Sole.
KGI: In the intro to your book, you describe the essence of Southern Italian cuisine as the simplicity of “natural ingredients” made using “straightforward, uncomplicated techniques.” What are a few of the ingredients and flavors that define the region for you and what makes them different from their counterparts available elsewhere?
NHJ: The natural ingredients I'm thinking of are the products of Southern Italian fields and gardens, the vegetables and fruits especially, that have such extraordinary depths of flavor, quite unlike those available elsewhere in the world. I put this down primarily to geography--also climate to a certain extent. Mild rainy winters and hot dry summers seem to be ideal for vegetable gardening. But the volcanic geography of much of the south--I think especially of the areas around Etna in Sicily and Vesuvius in Campania, but also, lesser known, the Monte Vulture in Basilicata. In Campania they call the soil arapilla and it means specifically soil that evolves from volcanic ash. In some places it goes down as much as three meters and it is peculiarly rich in minerals. That to me is one source of the flavor of tomatoes from the slopes of Vesuvius or the great array of citrus from around Etna, not to mention the wine grapes from all three regions. Puglia's geography is not volcanic but it represents another advantage--a porous limestone karst that soaks up rainwater and acts as a giant sponge beneath the fields of Puglia, where a large portion of Europe's organic vegetables are raised. Obviously everywhere in the world there are unique combinations of geography and climate that lead to the production of certain vegetables, but I think there are few places where such high quality is so consistent around the year and across the board as it is in the south of Italy.
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Is your garden looking good? Then show it off!
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Our Grow-Off Show-Off contest, like many of your gardens, is entering peak season. Here's the little ad we put up on YouTube.
You can of course enter things other than an online video. But if you do have a video camera, why not not have a little fun with it? Tell us why your pesto is the best-o. Entertain us with a garden joke. Juggle a few tomatillos for us.
If we don't "advertise" kitchen gardens, who will?
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The History of Gastronomy
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Check out our new "food for thought" video on youtube.com. Please share it if you find it of interest.
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