Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Harvest Home

The fall equinox is one of the few dates in the year that has a traditional agricultural holiday associated with it: Harvest Home, marking the end of the grain harvest. I kept the name for my Gardeners' Holiday because normally, this is a time of year when our garden is producing at its peak. In previous years, we've celebrated it with buckets of tomatoes, peppers, and raspberries, eked out by the first few French beans and winter squash and the dregs of the summer's zucchini and basil.

But over the past few years, that pattern has started to break down. More often than not, when the fall equinox rolls around, it seems to coincide with a lull in our harvest. This year is a case in point. Our tomatoes have been reasonably productive this year (4 big Pineapples, 54 Premios, 32 San Marzanos, and 121 Sun Golds to date), and our trusty Carmen pepper plants have yielded 26 juicy peppers. But just at the moment, none of the plants has a single fruit on it ready to harvest. The raspberry canes are still popping out ripe, juicy berries, but it's a trickle, not a flood: maybe a quarter-cup to a half-cup per day. 

We did have our zucchini plant surprise us this week with a massive "stealth zucchini," which cunningly hid itself among the leaves until it had grown to a whopping four pounds—large enough that the Brits would call it a marrow rather than a courgette—and we've still got about half of it left. But it seems to have expended all its resources on that one, because right now there's nothing on the vine larger than a fingerling. So tonight's table will feature only two homegrown items: the thyme in a mushroom tourtiere, and the fresh green beans that will accompany it. 

Fortunately, this pause in production appears to be only temporary. There are plenty of green tomatoes on the vines, ready to be picked as soon as they blush. There are young peppers on the pepper plants that we can expect to grow bigger and riper in the coming weeks. There are only six winter squash on the vines, but two of them are absolute giants, so the crop shouldn't be much below par in terms of poundage. And the winter lettuce I planted last month has already sent up several tiny shoots that are set to turn into mature heads. So while we may not be gleaning much right now, we can look ahead to a good harvest in the season to come.