What the garden gives

"You crown the year with your bounty; your wagon tracks overflow with richness." — Psalm 65:11

The garden this morning was quieter than it has been in weeks and I stood at the edge of it and noticed.

The beans are done. I knew they were finishing when I was out here last week, but now it is official. The plants are brown at the edges and the pods that are left are thin and dry and there is nothing more to pick. I will pull them this weekend and put them on the compost pile and that row will be open for the first time since May.

The tomatoes are still coming but the urgency has passed. Two weeks ago I was drowning in Rutgers. This morning I picked four and could have left them another day without losing anything. The cherry tomatoes are the same. They are still producing but they are producing at a pace I can keep up with, which was not true at the end of July. The zucchini, for reasons known only to the zucchini, is still going.

I noticed goldenrod along the road on my drive to church Sunday. It is early for goldenrod, or maybe it is not early and I have just been paying attention to other things. Goldenrod means something about August that I feel more than I can explain. It means the county fair is coming. It means school is starting somewhere. It means the year has crested and the other side of the hill is ahead.

The peppers are holding. The basil is leggy but still giving. The herbs along the south fence are doing what herbs do in August, which is grow without asking permission and spread into places I did not invite them.

I did not work in the garden this morning. I stood at the edge and I looked at it the way you look at something you have been doing for a long time when the doing has shifted from effort to observation. The garden is still giving. It will give for another month, maybe more. But the giving has changed. It is less frantic. It is the giving of a garden that has done its heavy work and is now simply being generous with what remains.

I picked the four tomatoes and I went inside and I set them on the counter next to the ones from yesterday and I made my coffee and I did not think about the garden again until just now.

Lord, you crown the year with your bounty, and I am standing in the middle of it.