Gardeners' Holidays 2026: Harvest Home

We’re at a turning point in the year. The Jewish calendar has just rolled over from 5786 to 5787 (which is why this entry won’t be posted until tonight, because I’m currently on my annual Internet fast for Yom Kippur). And tomorrow marks the fall equinox, otherwise known as Harvest Home, the official kickoff of the autumn harvest season.

And our garden is certainly rising to the occasion. For the past few weeks, we’ve been up to our elbows in raspberries, green beans, peppers, and especially tomatoes. According to my running total, we have now harvested 12 Vivacious tomatoes, 20 Goldies, 126 San Marzanos, 189 Premios, and a whopping 841 Sun Golds. The only disappointing producer has been the lone Pineapple plant, which has yielded only two big, juicy fruits. Brian and I have come regretfully to the conclusion that, tasty as the Pineapple tomatoes are, we’ll have to drop them from next year’s garden, because they’re just not able to earn their keep. We’ll consult the Fedco catalogue to see if there’s any other variety on offer that purports to be as flavorful as the Pineapple but more productive; if not, we’ll probably just stick with the varieties we have.

Fortunately, the tomato harvest has finally tapered off to just a few fruits per day, so we only need to eat a tomato-centered dish maybe once a week instead of every day. That leaves us free to concentrate on our green beans, which are still going at full blast. We’ve harvested most of the Provider beans at this point (about two and a half pounds’ worth), but the Climbing French beans are still cranking them out fast enough that we need to harvest them pretty much every day. Brian has been handling that job for the most part, so when I offered to help him with it yesterday, he wouldn’t let me get started until he’d acquainted me with “the rules”:

1. Take care not to step on the zucchini plants. These didn’t give us much during the summer, but there are still a few healthy fingerlings on them, and he wants to make sure they get big enough for grilling.
2. Take care not to impale yourself on the stakes on the pepper plants, which are so big and heavy that they’re starting to bend over and drag the stakes down with them. They haven’t been as massively productive as the tomatoes, but they’ve still given us a pretty good haul already: 4 peppers off the new Apple plant, 6 massive Aconcaguas, and 12 of our trusty Carmens.
3. Only harvest beans that are of good eating size. If they’re too small (skinny and less than a couple of inches long), they should stay on the vine to get bigger; if they’re too fat (meaning the beans inside the pod are big enough to form a distinct bulge), they’re not much good for eating and should stay on the vine until frost, at which point we can harvest them for seed.
   

Following this last rule was trickier than it sounds, because the vines are so big and sprawling that it’s sometimes hard to spot the beans. You could go over one plant thoroughly, thinking you’d picked it clean, and then come back in five minutes and find another whole handful of beans that had escaped your notice the first time. It took us several passes to glean about 4 ounces of beans in that one picking, and there were another 4 ounces out there on the vine when Brian went out again today, bringing our total for the year up to about 6.6 pounds. And that’s just from our first planting of French beans. There’s a whole second crop that I put in at the end of July in place of the snap peas, which are only just now starting to flower. If those plants are anywhere near as productive as their older siblings, they should keep us in beans until Thanksgiving.

The final crop that’s been keeping us on our toes is the raspberries. We’re about midway through our second harvest of these, and we’re bringing in close to a cup and a half of berries every day. I’ve been eating berries every day for lunch, and last weekend I brought a big plastic tub of them to a CCL event (sending postcards to CCL members in New Jersey encouraging them to vote). About three minutes after leaving I realized I’d left the container behind with over a cup of berries still in it, and I didn’t even bother going back for them because I knew there would be more than enough ripe berries on the canes for the next day’s lunch. (There were.) 

We’re celebrating Harvest Home tonight with of our new vegan version of Pasta a la Caprese, using our own home-grown tomatoes, peppers, and the tail end of the basil crop. (The plants are still out there, but they’re starting to look a little yellow and brittle, and we probably need to harvest what’s left soon and process it into paste for the freezer.) Fortunately, I’m not fasting in the conventional way, so we’ll be able to eat well before sundown and head off to board game night at Pino’s. That’s the nice thing about Gardeners’ Holidays as opposed to traditional ones: You can celebrate them in any way you like, at whatever time is most convenient. And speaking for myself, I’d much rather welcome in the autumn with a meal of home-grown produce than with a day of fasting and prayer.