The sun passed the ecliptic yesterday at 8:43am (EDT). This marks the autumnal equinox, the day the sun passes that imaginary equator in the sky in its annual trek through the seasons. By now, those of you who tolerate my blathering know that this event does not mark the true equinox since that day of equal length for night and day is dependent on latitude. Here where I live, day length is closest to 12 hours on the 25th. Yesterday was also not the day that the sun rises directly due east and west on the horizon. That happens today. This morning, the sun rose at exactly due east and sunset will mark west on the horizon tonight. For those of us in the north, we’re heading into the dark half of the year. Down south, it’s time for spring.
Here where I live, we have a few more weeks of possible growing season. On average, plants need at least nine hours of daylight to photosynthesize, and they start to get sleepy at less than ten. Think of this as their minimum daily caloric intake (because it more or less is…). Short days mean that the plant uses more energy in its daily activities than it can make for itself out of sunlight and CO2. So even if the weather stays warm, most plants will go dormant during the long weeks of short days. This is true for evergreens, too. Conifers may not completely stop all activity, but they do slow down substantially. They do not grow; they just maintain themselves.
The last ten-hour day in this part of the world is November 5th; the last nine-hour day is December 6th. If you garden in the temperate zones, you should look up day length and see when you pass the nine-hour mark. You won’t be gardening during those weeks, not even with a greenhouse. Though there are grow lights, I’m guessing in these times of rising energy costs (and depleting energy sources), it won’t pay to plug them in — because those things really suck up the electricity.
In any case, this time of the equinox is not the end of the harvest, though it is perhaps the beginning of the end. There may be frost soon to finish off the cucurbits, nightshades and the late beans. If you want a fall harvest of peas and greens this is about the last date you can plant them no matter where you live. However, it is just the beginning of garlic planting season since garlic goes in the ground just before it freezes, and you can sow over-wintering veg like kale, carrots, and beets until the first hard frost.
These winter crops are not for harvesting in winter. They will send up small plants in the waning autumn light, go dormant in the short days between St Nick’s Day and Epiphany, wake back up near the middle of January, and kick back into high gear when the ten-hour days return. In my part of the world, that happens around Candlemas. So over-wintered carrots will start growing again in February (with protection — I use straw and row cover), and there are carrots to harvest usually by late March, long before the spring-sown carrots are ready to eat. Here in Vermont, while those “winter-season” crops do not give us a harvest in the actual months of winter, we can have fresh veg in April or May when all the spring-planted crops are still just barely plants. The point to winter gardening is that there is fresh veg to eat in spring when the root cellar is really starting to look bare.
So this is not really the end of the gardening season, just a slowing down and a change in the tasks. In the dark half of the year, the pace is less intense, more relaxed. There is more time for thought and planning, less rushing about bent on relentless tasks. There is more focus on careful pruning and tool maintenance and much less time spent on yanking up the weeds and drilling in seeds. Of course, if you have animals, there is still a bit of hard work ahead. This is when many of them are in their breeding season. Paradoxically, this is also the time for the annual culling of the herds. (Not a great time of year to be a male… but I suppose they get to go out happy… if they’re breeders…)
For at least the last century or so, the time around the autumn equinox has been called Harvest Home. It is a time of thanksgiving and gathering together. For many cultures around the world, it is a time of remembrance, a time to especially honor the ancestors, those who are quite literally the founders of the feast. Some of the peoples of northern Europe might even have started their new year at the equinox, beginning a new annual sun cycle as the old season of growth ended. It is still the time of the the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, which begins with the new Hunter’s Moon on October 2nd. But Roman observers seemed to think that it was common in “Germania” to begin the new year around the time of the grape harvest, what was for them the Ludi Romani, two weeks of festival games dedicated to Jupiter that took place after the middle of September. (Note that for the Romans, Germania was pretty much everywhere outside the Empire. It’s none too clear who the “germans” were. And there are many things written in a Roman hand about northern peoples which are just plain nonsense… so…)
Even if it wasn’t the new year, ancient northern Europe certainly marked the day, unlike most of their southern cousins (who, being closer to the equator, where day length doesn’t change, didn’t have as much reason to note the equinox). The date of the sun’s rise exactly due east and its set due west are marked with ancient stones and structures throughout northern Europe. An interesting point is that these megalithic monuments were erected by pre-agricultural societies. There may have been farming — that is, they probably grew food, or at least substantially nudged along their favorite forage crops — but they did not follow a socio-economic system of surplus generation, that which we name “agriculture”. They were farming small plots to feed themselves, not growing crops to sell. So their huge silicate clocks were not marking planting or harvest time for society because that wasn’t part of their culture. It seems they were marking time in a more general sense, using the solar quarter days to keep track of the year.
And all these millennia later, we still mark and celebrate these inflection points in the sun’s apparent journey. We gather together to celebrate nature’s abundance. We note the cooler weather and the end of the green season. We say goodbye to migrating and hibernating species. We decorate our homes with fall foliage and flowers and all the many pumpkins and squashes, many of which serve double duty, lending bright color to the doorstep as they cure for winter storage, to then fill up our bellies with nourishing yumminess for months.
This year, there is again somewhat subdued color in New England. There is a fairly decent pumpkin harvest for those who do not have ravaging woodchucks. But our famed fall foliage is rather brown this year. The trees have abruptly turned themselves off, forgoing autumn to conserve their resources. You see, to make beautiful color, a tree needs to slowly cut back on photosynthesis but keep leaf tissues alive. The autumn color we see is the color of the leaf without the chloroplasts — the photosynthesizing parts of leaf cells — reflecting all the green light back at our eyes. This is the “actual” color of the leaf tissues. But to see it, the leaf has to be alive, yet not photosynthesizing, which will not happen if the tree is stressed. It won’t bother keeping its leaves intact when it stops making food. It will just shed its leaves and go to sleep for the winter — which is what is happening here in Vermont. There are some trees, here and there, turning riotous maple vermillion and birch gold, but mostly the leaves are just turning rusty brown and rattling in the wind. There may be a tree or two aglow in the morning mist, but the astonishing swathes of vibrancy that make up a Vermont autumn are missing, much to the chagrin of the leaf-peeper tourist industry. This has happened for various reasons for several years running. I fear it may be a trend…
Some folks celebrate the equinox as Thanksgiving, and most years I do too. But I tend to save the harvest feast for Michaelmas on the 29th. Michaelmas is the actual quarter day in the English calendar. It is also the day when most Harvest Home celebrations were held. So to me it just feels more substantial, more weighted with tradition. But in practice, it usually comes down to having the time to prepare and consume a feast. One can’t do much celebrating in the middle of the work-week. Especially as the most important ingredient in the celebration is gathering friends and family together. So serve up the holiday goose — or colcannon or latkes with applesauce or whatever feels right for a Harvest celebration — when you have the time to savor it.
Whatever day you choose, be sure to set aside a few moments for reflection. Even if this isn’t the end of the harvest or the end of the year, it is the end of the season of growth. It is just on the cusp of the time of contraction and repose, the time of death for many short-lived beings. So this is a natural time to think on the cycles of life. And to remember — and thank — those who have gone before us and passed on their living spirit so that we might be here now. Remember those you have known and loved. But also remember the forgotten and the unacknowledged. Our lineage owes as much to all the beings who make our lives possible as to those in our genetic webs. This is a good time to remember all those to whom we owe gratitude. I am not one who believes much in spirits, but I do believe in memory and respect. All those beings who led to me deserve honor from me. This is a good time of year to dig down to our roots, recognizing that nothing would exist without them…
And so, be grateful! It is autumn! And the hard work of growth is blessedly over for another year.
From the Erstwhile Book Cellar
An indispensable book on gardening the short days is The Winter Harvest Handbook by Eliot Coleman (2009, Chelsea Green). Coleman, a Maine organic farmer, is about the only writer I know to grapple with the problem of producing full nutrition in a temperate climate without resorting to either high energy inputs (for heat and light and water) or the more traditional solution, storing energy and nutrients in animal flesh. (There are charts and tables… ) His methods and inventive infrastructure supply his farm stand with three plus seasons of fresh garden produce with only one heated greenhouse — in Maine! If you grow food or flowers at high latitude, you need this book.
An Interesting Early Morning Sky Observance
Go out before sunrise tomorrow and look to the southeast. The waning gibbous moon is in between a very bright Jupiter and a fairly bright Mars. The bright stars Capella, Betelgeuse and Aldebaran ring this solar system grouping, and the Pleiades glow just above the moon on the ecliptic.
In these last months of 2024, Jupiter is moving closer to the Earth and increasing in brightness every week. It will reach its maximum in December, with opposition on December 7th.
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
