Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, Act iii. Sc. 6.
The glowing embers of England's changeable August have given way to September's fruitfulness and the cooler winds of Autumn. Television Weather pundits point to their charts and promise us halcyon days of an Indian summer that will stretch into a mellow October. We have heard such promises before. The swallows however, which have enlivened the long summer evenings with their overhead aerobatics at day's end before the bats ventured forth from barn and belfry into the gathering dusk, have already fled south to warmer climes.
The evenings draw in. It is time now to clean up my Isle of Wight cottage garden, grown blowsy from a summer excess of floral colour and foliage, and enjoy the fruits of my vegetable garden husbandry. I have already enjoyed a massive crop of ripe and aromatically juicy tomatoes.
Will a kind Autumn encourage those late burgeoning bunches of green fruit still hanging to ripen on the stem before the wintry north-east winds strip the leaves from the trees? Or shall I be spending my October evenings in the kitchen potting up batches of spicy green tomato chutney to add to the jars of home-made zucchini and corn relish, pickled walnuts, and strawberry jam in the larder.
The relish is witness to an overabundant harvest of zucchini from the five seedlings I planted out after the swallows returned to enliven our summer sky at the beginning of May. I have left one zucchini to expand to its full size and girth as a monster marrow; an offering for my local community's Harvest Home festival.
A good plum pudding and a bacon bone,
And that's a right good harvest home."
I appreciate vegetables that are decorative as well as edible. The Cucurbita family of zucchini, marrow and pumpkin admirably fulfil this role in my country garden. Their bright orange or yellow male and female flowers and large broad leaves can also hide a multitude of sins. Like their oriental cousins the ornamental gourds, they can be easily trained over fences and up walls and, more importantly for me in my confined garden space, do yeoman service in covering an unsightly but essential garden compost heap.
