Summer finally remembered its manners. It left a few weeks ago without a goodbye, without a hug and kiss for those of us who love it so much and favor it of all seasons. I like a little assurance that it will come around again and that this cooling and darkening into autumn is the natural life cycle of our trip around the sun. So it glowed a final hurrah the past few days. Mild, breezy, gently reminding even the bugs that it is almost over.  

No frost yet. Still, I am removing and cutting down what’s done in the garden. I’ll have to think of something more to do with the last tomatoes, and there are many. Usually there are lots of green ones to set on newspaper for indoor ripening, but this year they did it all on the mother plants. Onions and garlic are dug and dried and waiting in buckets. Potatoes and carrots are still in the ground; the root cellar is almost finished downstairs, but not yet as cool as the ground. Peppers and eggplant go into peak production at the end of the season, apparently oblivious that their end is near. The green beans still produce an occasion meal. Kale and parsley are at their best. New plantings of lettuce and spinach are up; a little frost doesn’t bother them.  

The perennials are doing the last act of the summer performance. I’m amazed at how long phlox keep blooming. Their purple and white is still pretty. Sedum heads are soft pink and anise hyssop spikes are still purple. Black-eyed susans are still yellow. Joe-pye plumes, though, turned brown and rosy echinacea are now seed heads for finches. 

Annuals are fearless: impatiens, petunias, portulaca, verbena, ageratum, and lobelia are massed in color. I have them circled around a concrete leaf sculpture in a sunny corner of the vegetable garden. Mature patty pan squash look like white and yellow rocks, which I’ve lined up like a stone border where the grass meets the garden.  

For next year I vowed to plant only short stuff. Anything tall toppled this year. The cosmos fell over, often without blooming, and took the red zinnias with them. They flopped over the nearby carrots and low annuals until I decided they had to come out. I don’t know what to do about corn. I planted a variety that the seed catalog said would be 5-6 feet tall and it grew to 8 feet! And fell over. Onto the gladiolas. Which also flop unless caged, which I neglected to do. They looked unregimented to a strict eye, but yielded well all the same. Gardener’s note: plant them as you wish, but they have their own ideas on how to live.   

The purple concord grapes are ripe, a favorite with wild turkeys. A flock of six turkeys cruised through just now and sampled the fruit. They like them best later in the season when the grapes have frosted and dried into raisins. Then the turkeys actually climb the vines to get them. 

Clouds and a little rain moved in overnight, a reminder that in less than eight weeks the green will be gray, the breeze will be chill wind, and the rain could be snow. Then we’ll live indoors and know the interior life.