The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.

There is no shortage of literary works that wax rhapsodic about the changing of seasons in the  garden, so anything I write has probably been written before, better and with more authority. Still, these past two weeks of cool, primarily sunny days have been nothing short of awe inspiring.

In my native northwest Ohio, the first frost has typically knocked down the summer crops by this time of year, and frost-tolerant plants will fall prey to the first hard freeze in  another week or two. Conversely, autumn in the Southern garden is the most fulfilling season. The frantic drive of spring planting and laborious summer watering, weeding and harvesting are finished. Hearty, minimal-maintenance crops have supplanted fussy, disease-prone tomatoes and peppers. Pests are slow and few. Heatstroke is no longer a legitimate threat. With a little luck and a kind nod from the weather, I will be harvesting carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, beets, spinach and turnips well into December, if not the New Year. 

I cannot help but wonder what the Southern colonists, who came mostly from a climate similar to Ohio, thought about three-season or even year-round gardening, and how long it took them to work out what best to plant for maximum winter food production. Fresh greens in January must have seemed an almost unimaginable treat to them. It’s no wonder we celebrate the New Year with collards.  

When you compare the Plymouth colony with Jamestown or our own “old” Salem, it seems the Northerners would have been at an extreme disadvantage. The summer growing season in coastal Massachusetts is about 150 days, compared to 175 days for the North Carolina Piedmont. That’s nearly an extra month of production, and with frost-tolerant crops, the  growing season for the Salemites extended to at least 260 days.

My first real experience with the limitations of a Northern climate came my sophomore year in high school. Sophomores were required to take biology, and it was a well-established institution that an insect collection consisting of at least 30 different species was due in mid-October. Owing to my carefully cultivated “never do today what you can put off until tomorrow”  vibe, I found myself at the beginning of October with a nifty display box, and only a half-dozen  insects mounted in it. I set about frantically scouring the woods and fields around my house, but it turns out that frost has roughly the same effect on bugs as it does on plants. I was able  to scrounge up another 20 or so by literally looking under every rock, but fell a handful short, earning me a “C-” for my effort. My buddy Carl supplemented his similarly meager collection with a green plastic soldier pinned through the chest and labeled “Beetle Bailey.” He got a  “C+,” which shows having an odd sense of humor does have value.