I bent over the sage and lavender, searching for new green leaves. They should have appeared by now. Yes, there was some new growth but, clearly, many stems had expired.
The rain, the sight of the Sun at the top of the sky, the quickened greening of the earth and the press of crops ready for harvest pull us into the rising tide of the growing season.
Touring the garden, perennial herbs and flowers, as well as fall-planted garlic that emerged from snowdrifts scarcely two weeks ago, have been growing quickly since the recent heat wave.
At this time of moving between preparing outdoor and indoor spaces for winter, dig and pot a few of the frost hardy plants still in the ground. Where trees have grown so tall as to block hours of direct sunlight from the vegetable garden, late fall and winter are good times to harvest them for firewood.
In the first of her biweekly columns about growing and gardening in the Berkshires, Judy Isacoff writes: "Stars, the sunlit moon and planets circle the expanse of frozen, fertile ground during these long nights. There’s the sense of a night shift at work underground."
