Late Melons
Sweetness and grief
Issue 59: From Sara Kate
The funny thing about gardening in the northeast is that summer isn’t really where the action is. It’s fall. Where I garden, in upstate New York (hardiness zone 5a) we can enjoy greens like lettuce, chard, and kale from June onward, and things like beets and cherry tomatoes start to mature in August. But the real show stoppers, like big juicy heirloom tomatoes, melons, and squash like butternut, don’t start stepping out onto the stage until September. By then the leaves are wilting and the weight of the fruit is pulling down the plants’ various support systems. The garden is no longer magazine beautiful, it is now reality beautiful.
This year I grew a variety of cantaloupe called Delicious 51, and though it is labeled an “early producer,” that depends heavily on the gardener getting the seeds in early and I did not, so I didn’t slice into my first fruit until last week. But it was worth the wait: this guy was super juicy, candy-level sweet, had a vibrant orange flesh, and an aroma that filled up the room. It was a scene we might be conditioned to associate with summer, but one that I have grown to understand is actually about moving closer to winter. And it’s more than the color of the fruit and the scent it emits when cut into; it’s the experience of putting on a jacket and boots to go retrieve it off the vine in the rain, and the acceptance that it’s one of the last fresh bits of homegrown food I’ll harvest for many months. There is grief and joy all at once.
This last time I was upstate, there were just three on the vine for the taking and one that was not quite ready, so I ate the ripest (it already had a worm starting to burrow into it!), brought one home to Brooklyn with a ribbon around it to give to someone who had just had surgery, and chopped the last one up, froze it, and blended it with lime juice into sorbet like I did earlier this summer with watermelon.
That final fruit hanging onto dear life on the steel support? I hope it weathers these cool nighttime temperatures that brush against frost until I get back to it and have that very last taste of summer, dead center of fall, on my way to winter.