“The thinnest yellow light of November is more warming than any wine they tell of.”

Henry David Thoreau

In Lucille’s Garden, I start every season with an ambitious — and possibly insane — goal: to grow food for as many months of the calendar year as I possibly can. I start early, sowing some seeds in January, more in February, and then a staggering number in March. By early spring I’m planting out in the garden, and, if the weather cooperates, I start harvesting at the end of April.

Then comes the blinding rush of the season. The wild growth that sometimes – often – eats entire pathways and topples trellises. The plants know their season and go. I do my best to support them and get out of their way.

In October, there’s always a tipping point. Usually, it comes when the yellow grass in the meadows turns gold, a metallic sheen among the fading green that reminds me that autumn is coming and the garden is slowing down. It comes every year, but every year I struggle with it. How do I downshift the heavy work of the season to a slower pace?

Practicing Gratitude for the Year’s Bounties

Mostly I manage this through a combination of practicing gratitude for the season we just passed, and the one that will come next.

This year we donated well over a ton of food to the Food Bank for Delaware County, 2,862 pounds in total — a new all-time record! The overall number is great, but what means more to me is the total number of weeks we harvested. This year, we ran 43 successful harvest days between April 24 and November 20 — a 7-month period!

We welcomed hundreds of summer campers and field trip students into the space, where they harvested food for the community and practiced their cooking skills. It made me happy every day to see them running through the garden. The act of practicing gratitude came so naturally to the kids, in part because of the amazing work the Tyler educators did sharing the space with them, but also because I think for kids the connection feels immediate. Plants do remarkable things.

One Friday afternoon in August, an entire group of campers gathered right at the garden gate, shifting and whispering among themselves until they could all yell in unison “Thank you, Garden!” As a final act for their week of camp, it received mixed reviews. My resident pileated woodpecker friend flew off in a huff, but I think the plants appreciated the gesture.

Connecting One Year to the Next

It also comforts me to know that, even as I reflect on the previous season, I can begin the act of preparing for next year. A vegetable garden seems so finite, changing from moment to moment. But the longer you work one, the more you can see the threads that connect the space to all past and future versions of itself. Every vegetable garden carries the ghost of all the things it had been before.

Maybe that’s why I love compost so much. It is the actual thing that connects the garden year to year. Last year’s plants nourish this year’s growth, so the strength of the soil is endlessly recycled. If you’ve never done composting before, it’s fairly simple — even when it seems like it’s not. You can find a tutorial here on our YouTube channel or a step-by-step guide here on our blog.

I love my compost bins behind Lucille’s. I turn them once a week, sometimes more in the height of the season. I even keep a thermometer in there to make sure the temperatures are measuring right — I like my pile to sit right at 120-130 degrees. Not too hot and not to cold, a Goldilocks zone that I find to be perfect for quickly breaking down garden waste.

I keep it in that range by putting in fresh greens — I have plenty in the form of weeds — and dried leaves. I practice the lasagna method: one layer of green followed by one layer of brown. By turning the compost each week, I introduce plenty of air, good macro and micro invertebrates, fungi and helpful bacteria that keep the pile active and breaking down throughout the season. Generally, in one year I can pull compost from my pile once in spring, once during the summer, then again in the fall.

In the spring and summer, I use my compost to top dress my potato beds. Come fall, it’s all about garlic. I plant my hardneck garlic just before Halloween. In part so that the bulbs have a chance to sprout before winter sets in, and in part so that I can tell the visiting kids that it helps keep the vampires away. If you are interested in learning more about growing garlic, you can find a great tutorial on our blog that covers all the steps.

Garlic is remarkably hardy and will sprout less than a month after you plant it. Then when the temperatures dip and the ground is frozen, its brave green leaves are already there forming the backbone of the garden to come.

Of course, if you’re like me, you’ve planted way too many fall crops for the garlic to have a neat and tidy zone to grow in. So, I plant my garlic where I can, amending the soil with my compost as I go. The result is that when the garden goes to bed with the first heavy frost, the brave green shoots of the garlic remain as a fingerprint of the garden that has passed.

It will be there in the spring as well and come March I’ll be planting around the ghost of this year’s garden. I’m about to dive into the planning season, when I sit down with seed catalogues and bed grids, and seeing how the past informs the future is one of my favorite parts of the process.

So, whether you want to talk garden planning, composting or hardneck garlic, stop by and visit Lucille’s Garden the next time you’re at Tyler. Even in winter there’s always something to see.