Tis the season of late-night canning sessions. Saucing tomatoes before the fruit flies take over the house. Preparing plums for drying until my fingers are purple. Making pesto cubes until I can’t stand the smell of basil. Yanking the squash before it freezes. Freezing everything else and wondering where the hell I’m going to put it all.  Then wondering how we’ll get it all to Montana. The question remains: What to do with all this Swiss Chard?  Not to mention the celery that I can’t seem to unload at the Farmer’s Market.

I think everyone is finally over tomatoes. I couldn’t get rid of our cherry tomatoes, even if I tried to give them away. Yet, when a friend called and asked if I wanted some of his extra tomatoes (“I’m done with ‘em,” he told me), I said yes! Am I crazy? Despite the fact that we planted over 60 tomato plants, the blight got us and I’d only canned 2 cases of sauce. That isn’t near enough to get me through the year. So I went and picked up his tomatoes and made another batch of sauce in what I hope will be my last late-night canning session of the season.

The garden is winding down. It is sad, all those empty beds. The sunflowers and hops have been yanked. Tomatoes and peppers pulled. All except the cold-weather crops, and lettuce and spinach under cold frames have been removed from their beds. The compost bins are overflowing with the stalks of this year’s abundance. I am ready to move on to fall activities of wood hauling, delayed sewing and writing projects, and catching up on my reading.

But before I completely move on from the garden, we must plant our garlic, mulch it heavy, and tuck it in for a long winter’s nap.