The Daily: 16 October 2025

We had our first frost last Friday with a sustained low of around 26°F that lasted half the night. Most of the veg garden died. Some of the trees finally decided to get going on fall, those that aren’t already bare, that is. The honey locust is dotted with gold droplets amongst the green. The changed leaves are not staying on the tree very long, though, so my veg garden is already carpeted in golden honey locust leaves — which is almost as lovely as the white carpet of honey locust flowers that fall in the early summer. The butternuts decided to go the more traditional route and turn colors before dropping leaves. Unfortunately, they were rather grumpy before the frost and had already lost many leaves to the drought. Still, they’re pretty in a classical Vermont autumn fashion.

The maples, however, are all still resolutely green.

I don’t fully understand that. Supposedly, maples set their clocks by day length, not temperature. So it doesn’t matter when the frost hits, they have their own timekeeping, measuring hours of light and darkness. In early August, the days are short enough that a maple tree stops photosynthesis in its outer-most leaves, and these turn bright orange, red and gold over a mass of deep green. But when day length drops below thirteen hours in September, the trees start to shut down in earnest, usually quickly changing from nearly all green to bare branches in a few weeks. It is rare for maples to have any leaves left after the autumnal equinox, never mind being green into the middle of October.

However, some tree folks say that a stressed tree will hold on to its leaves deeper into fall to try to make up for lost photosynthesis. Autumn weather, with cooler temperatures and frequent but light rain, is almost always more congenial for plant life than summer. But this summer was disastrous for plants. Any weather is an improvement. In any case, if it’s true that a green tree in October might be a stressed tree, then my maples probably need professional counseling. They’re so green, they may well be traumatized. Still, they do not have the drought burnt-brown leaves I’ve seen all over the state. So, I don’t know what is going on. Maybe my jungle’s mother tree (the one behind my garage that must be something like 200 years old) just decided to stay awake for a while longer and has not issued her mycelia-net bulletin to the youngsters, directing them all to make ready for winter.

But surely it is time. Yesterday was the last day with more than eleven hours of sunlight in my part of the world. All trees slow down at these low levels of sunlight. There just isn’t enough time to make sufficient food for high levels of activity. They get sleepy in the short days. Many other plants just abruptly quit. Most annuals will call it a season and wilt down after setting seed even before a frost. Same for perennial plants with soft stems. Those with woody stems tend to be evergreen, but, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, winter green is not the same as summer. This is because the plant is largely dormant in the winter with only minimal chloroplasts still making sugar, just enough food to stay awake, but not enough to add on growth — or create vivid color. This is true for all evergreens in temperate climes — which are temperate because day length varies with the season. It’s not the temperature or the climate that makes the leaves fall… it’s the hours of sunlight. Because a plant relies on those hours to feed itself. Too few hours and it has to go to sleep to conserve energy.

I sympathize. I’m sleepier in the dark too. And I rely on daylight hours to get garden things done just like the rest of the garden. At less than eleven hours of light in a day, I have rather less than two hours of weekday daylight that are not spent in my work cubicle. Even weekends are a time crunch in the garden in the darkening autumn days. This past long weekend saw me racing against the clock, even working in the drizzling rain, trying to get the garden clean-up done after the frost made a royal mess of things.

But it is time. I am usually on garden clean-up detail in October, even when the frost is later. This is when I compost all the spent plants, rake the beds and pull out the last weeds, spread seaweed fertilizer, and mulch all the perennial beds. This year, I’ve been planting bulbs and many more herbs and perennial flowers to fill in holes left behind by rodent and drought destruction. I planted next year’s garlic and will need to spread straw on those beds to insulate them a bit and to conserve moisture. I’ve also been turning more grass into perennial beds… because I hate grass… No, actually, it’s more that the grass has died and cleavers are taking over those spots… And I hate cleavers even more than grass. I’ve been pulling cleavers out of the front bank — where apparently it was intentionally planted by the former folks — since I moved into this house. Now, it’s spreading everywhere else. I’ve even yanked it out of the veg beds across the street. It was rambling all through the potatoes. There was colorful language when I discovered them. The nerve of some plant-people!

But I did finally get a potato harvest. Not great, but enough. I think it’s about twenty pounds of Adirondack Blue and Elba potatoes, varieties that cost a pretty penny at the store — if I can find them at all. The half dozen or so seed potatoes that I cut up back in the spring have multiplied into dozens of spuds, now filling a bin in the basement cold storage. Not a bad return. Certainly, better than I expected. Probably enough to last most of the winter… used judiciously.

I was also happily surprised by the carrot harvest. I had been mostly ignoring the carrots since the meningitis thing hit in July. I pulled a few here and there for fresh eating, but I didn’t thin them nor even pay much heed to those that had started flowering. On Sunday, I dug up the bed, thinking that I would just be composting the lot. But nothing doing. There were carrots under all that green! Mostly small, but all sweet smelling and fat. And so many! I have a full storage bin of purple and orange carrots, with a few yellow and white ones for interest. Not that the purple ones need extra interest… They are purple, for one thing. But they are also weird. Lots of double roots, some with three, four, five limbs. They’re little demon roots, quite mandrake-like. Chopping them up for the stewpot is likely to be a challenge, physically — because they’re all twisty — and emotionally — because they look like they’re sentient… They might fight back. Or just run away.

Part of garden clean-up is planning for next year. It is especially important to write down what happened this year — what worked, what failed, what was planted where in the veg beds. I don’t plant nightshades or cucurbits in the same places two years in a row because pests and disease organisms can overwinter in the soil and then take down the whole bed in spring. Moving the families of plants around at least makes the buggers work to find their preferred foods again. However, this requires a bit of finagling every year.

Do you remember those “15 puzzles”? The ones that are a 4×4 grid of numbered tiles with one more hole than tile. The object is to put the numbers in order with just that one hole available to shuffle the numbers around. My garden feels like that. Or maybe a 16 puzzle… There is no extra space. Sometimes I fudge a bit with the nightshades because potatoes don’t share many pests with their cousins. So they’re usually fine in a bed that was planted in tomatoes the year before — as long as I keep the beds well composted and fertilized with seaweed and bone meal.

You can’t fudge with the cucurbits though. Squash bugs and squash beetles will annihilate everything from pumpkins to melons to cucumbers if you plant them in the same bed two years in a row. Now, you don’t have to move them far because apparently these flying insects are incredibly stupid. If the plant isn’t right there where they wake up in spring, rather than go looking around in the vicinity — which should be fairly easy with wings — they just leave. Or die. I’m not sure, really, and I sure don’t care either way.

So, that’s part of garden clean-up, figuring out where everything will go next year and writing that down. (Because, no, you will not remember…)

But a more fun part of garden clean-up is letting your imagination plant the perfect garden for next year. As I’m chopping up the brittle stalks and hoeing out the cleavers, I’m seeing neat rows of carrots, none of which are in flower. Unless I want to save seeds, of course. I’m seeing properly staked cucumbers loaded with lovely cylindrical fruits and nary a spine on them. I’m seeing a melon that actually lives long enough to make an edible fruit. And beans… well, maybe not so much on the bean front these days.

Unfortunately, it seems that I am aging out of beans. For a few years now I’ve been having digestive problems after eating hummus or red beans and rice. But I’ve been eating beans most every day for my whole life, so I didn’t make the connection until this summer. Meningitis turns your digestive tract inside-out. (Or that’s what it feels like anyway…) And eating hummus, even just a spoonful on a cracker, was orders of magnitude worse than other foods. But as the spinal infection cleared up and I could eat again (among other normal land of the living activities), the bean problem remained. Eventually I looked it up… Lo and behold, beans are right at the top of the list of foods that aging guts just can’t handle. (Along with cabbage… And cheese…)

So, I won’t be putting as much effort into dried beans… which is kind of a relief. I am so tired of fighting the groundhog… and then corralling the plants that survive hog predation, trying to convince them to grow up the nice trellis I built for them rather than draping themselves all over the zucchini. I haven’t come up with a good way to dry the beans in this humid climate (even in an extreme drought year there is humidity… it’s not fair…). And Vermont doesn’t have a long enough growing season to mature the varieties I really love — chickpeas and black turtle beans. In short, beans have not been a success story in this garden, and I don’t feel at all bad about no longer banging my head against that very hard wall each year — now that I have a perfect excuse not to… 

But I can plant beans in my imaginary garden. They all spiral gracefully up the bean trellis and bloom in showers of red and white and purple. The pods are all bright green with no blight or fungus, and they swell so pleasingly with evenly spaced embryonic bean plants. There are never vines viciously strangling the poor defenseless melons or forgotten beans that mutate into obscene ten-inch hairy leather thongs. (Ahem…)

I can probably also plant fillet beans. Those don’t seem to give me trouble. (I think it’s the skin on the bean itself that sets my gut writhing.) And I can grow scarlet runner beans just for the flowers. Hummingbirds love them. And, in an elegant bit of symbiosis, an early spring planting of beans, if it survives the hog, is flowering just as the hummers are arriving in Vermont. 

So, I was enjoying the imaginings of my ideal garden as I cleaned up the reality. Time was when this was somewhat depressing, especially knowing that the ideal garden would never happen. But, if deteriorating digestion and aching joints are the curse of this aging body, a sort of equanimity in old age has been its blessing. Maybe it’s that I have fewer growing seasons left to realize those lofty goals. Best just focus on what is right in front of me. But I think it’s also that I’m just more content with what’s right in front of me. I do like imagining. I’m a storyteller after all. But I also like the garden as it grows without me painting it in. I like that it has its own ideas, even when those ideas are groundhogs and cleavers and possibly-sentient purple carrots. 

Of course, it may also just be that I just don’t get that agitated or emotionally invested any more, not when things go wrong, not when things go right. There’s a whole lot of “Meh” in old age… That’s not a bad thing. It certainly is a calmer way of being. I look at the freakish carrots and smile. (Because I would never have imagined such a thing…) I think younger me might have freaked out.

But she would have eaten the freaks all the same. Just as I plan on doing. 

So… drought and meningitis be damned, it was an okay growing season in my garden after all. I’ve got bins of food. Most of the plants survived, and it was the grass (that I hate) that succumbed, giving me a perfect excuse to put in more pretty survivors. It even seems like I might be winning against the crap sumac and other nasty jungle creepers. I hadn’t been out there to cut that stuff down since Midsummer, and yet none of it was more than waist high and rather sickly and spindly. Of course, there was a drought… but maybe it’s also just wearing down… finally… 

In any case, we’ve had frost… and it’s time for winter. Thank heaven! Because it’s just too dark to be out there working. And I’m feeling rather sleepy…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2025