Last Harvest

There are two harvests. The first one is sweet, green, and ripe. The second is hard, dry, and shriveled.

There is always that fig tree and its dropping fruit mentioned in the Bible as metaphor. Many of us cold climate moderns know only of crab apples and chokecherries, and nothing of figs or that there is such a thing as two harvests from a tree.

The fig tree has two harvests, the spring one, and the later fall harvest.

But we do have two harvests in the northerly zones. We have forgotten this because we often throw the second harvest away or leave it to mold on the stem. I was thinking of this as I sat quietly alone on the grass, shelling peas. Old, dry and bitter peas.

The second harvest is picked, dried, kept in a dark place and brought out for later --in the spring where it will grow into a plant.

Some plants, such as carrots, produce seeds that only produce one piece of edible produce. Other seeds, such as peas, produce one plant but many pieces of edible produce.

Many of us don't save the seeds, but instead order new ones from the catalog every year. If we saved the seeds we would be more likely to wonder a bit about that second harvest and what it means. What does it mean to be saved, put aside, and hidden in a secret place out of winter's cold?

image: Rye Fields (1878) by Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin