The October Garden: What Actually Needs Doing

My October garden does not ask permission to wind down. The tomatoes stop producing whether I am ready for them or not. The zucchini I swore I was finished with in August has already made that decision for me. There is something clarifying about a garden in October. It is honest in a way that the earlier months are not.

Walking through it this time of year, I am always struck by how quickly things shift. Three weeks ago there were still things to pick. Now the same beds look like they are exhaling. The leaves are softening. The light has changed. If you walk out there expecting the version of the garden that existed in August, you will be disappointed. If you walk out there with your eyes open, it is actually quite beautiful.

The practical work this month is mostly about not fighting that honesty. Pulling the plants that are clearly done. Adding compost back to beds that gave everything they had over a long summer. If you grow garlic, October is when it goes in the ground, which always strikes me as an act of faith. You are putting something in the ground that you will not eat until next summer, and you just have to trust the ground. I have done this enough years now that I believe it will work.

The thing I have learned to resist is the urge to clean up too thoroughly. I used to cut everything back hard in the fall and then wonder where the birds went. Leaving some seed heads standing through the winter turns out to matter, both to them and to the insects that overwinter in hollow stems. The garden looks a little messier this way. It is also more honest about what a garden actually is, which is not a decorating project. The mess is part of it.

I also try to take notes while I still remember what happened. Which tomato variety actually performed. Where something got too much shade. Which bed held water after a heavy rain. Which plant wasn’t worth the space it took. These are exactly the things I’ll need to know in April. A garden is good at humbling you that way: by spring, the details that seemed obvious in October are gone, and you’re back to being surprised by the same things that surprised you the year before. The notes help, though I reserve the right to plant too many tomatoes again anyway.

October is a good time to pay attention to what the garden is actually telling you, instead of what you had hoped it would do. That is not as easy as it sounds. We go into every season with a picture in our heads of how it is going to go. When the garden goes a different direction, which it always does in at least one or two places, the useful response is to write it down and adjust for next year, not to argue with what happened. In that sense it has more in common with the rest of life than we usually give it credit for.