Gardeners' Holidays 2023: Harvest Home

The Gardeners' Holiday in mid-September is based on a traditional holiday in the English folk calendar: Harvest Home, also known as Ingathering, marking the end of the grain harvest. (This is when John Barleycorn traditionally gets murdered, only to rise again the following year.) Our garden doesn't contain any grain, but this holiday nonetheless marks the height of our harvest season, when our tomatoes, peppers, and second crop of raspberries are all at their peak.

This year's September harvest, though, is a bit of a mixed bag. We're getting plenty of tomatoes off our trusty Sun Gold and Premio plants, as well our new San Marzano plum tomato, which definitely looks like a keeper. (Some of the fruits it's produced are not just tasty but also entertaining: little conjoined twins that Brian has dubbed "tomeeples.") The Pineapple tomatoes have produced only a handful of fruits, but they're nice, big, juicy ones. But the Carmen and Banana peppers have provided only a handful of fruits so far, and while the new Biquinho chilis have yielded dozens of little pepperlings, each one is so tiny that the total volume is barely a couple of handfuls. Our Provider green beans have utterly failed to live up to their name, giving only a few ounces worth, and the later-producing Climbing French beans have so far produced only a few ounces as well. And while our raspberry canes are giving us a little something to pick every day, it's not much compared with the spring crop (and certainly not compared with the massive harvest of plums we had this summer).

But there is one crop that's proving surprisingly productive for this time of year: the arugula. And what's all the more surprising about it is that we didn't actually plant a fall crop of arugula. We put some in last spring, but we harvested only a few cups' worth before it all bolted, and we figured that was the end of it. But apparently those plants have somehow reseeded themselves—and not just in the beds where we originally planted them, but all over the paths surrounding the beds. In fact, the plants in the paths look even bigger and healthier than the ones in the beds, and all of them look better than the ones we planted in the spring. (We've observed this sort of thing with arugula before. It seems to perform best when it sows itself at random, rather than being carefully planted and tended in a well-prepared garden bed.)

We've already enjoyed some of this unexpected harvest in the warm chickpea salad that we learned from Mark Bittman, which makes a reasonable light supper when accompanied by some hearty bread. And there's plenty where that came from to use in other arugulacentric dishes, like arugula-mushroom pasta and pasta with arugula and dried cranberries. There might even be enough for experimenting with some new recipes once we've been through all those old favorites.

So, while we might not have that wide a variety of crops to harvest for our Harvest Home celebration, we still have enough fresh veggies to have fun with. And since this is only the beginning, not the end, of our fall harvest, we can hope there's more where that came from.