Autumn Equinox

Just before 8.30 this morning, we here in eastern Australia will pass through the equinox. This morning I noticed, for the first time this year, that it was still properly dark when I got up, the quiet and still of night. Not even the predawn birds. Yesterday was the kind of heat that makes you give up on outdoor jobs, but this morning I had a moment of actually feeling the coming of winter, the way you can sense a coming storm even while the sky is still blue with fluffy white clouds.

The equinox is the half-way point between the summer solstice (the longest day) and the winter solstice (the shortest day). But if you graph the change in daylength, it’s not an even line but a parabolic curve. In six weeks, at the midpoint between the equinox and the solstice, the curve flattens out and the change in daylength becomes imperceptible, seconds a day. So, just six weeks left until the end of the everlasting days of summer and the start of the season when there is never enough time in the day to get everything done.

Plants can tell the days are shortening. It’s called photoperiodism, and I find it one of those miracles of life that plants can not only count the hours and minutes of daylight but compare it with yesterday. In the garden, it’s time to start planting the things that solve the problem (for them) of winter, by storing food until lengthening days signal good times ahead and time to seed. Garlic and onions, cabbage and turnips, celeriac and cauliflower.  There’s a whole set of posts about what I plant, in northern NSW, this time of year at Early Autumn Planting.  It will be different in your part of the world but the concepts are the same – with a few exceptions like broad beans, it will be plants that hunker down and store food to see them through.

I’m not a fan of winter. I like light and warm. I like being barefoot and outside. Winter always comes on me unprepared. So the equinox is a good warning. It’s like when the kids are playing hard and having fun and the games are getting a bit manic, and you give them first warning – half an hour more and it’s time to come in and get cleaned up. Equinox is first warning. There won’t be unlimited time to get harvests in and preserving done – this afternoon I’ll make the first batch of tamarillo sauce for the season and another pick of Madagascar beans. It’s time to get the firewood pile sorted and the mending pile ready. It’s time to scour the book and craft sections of the op shop. It’s time to start pulling the manic growth of summer into some kind of order.

We pruned the verge garden food forest yesterday, quite hard, reining in the manic pumpkins and sweet potatoes and snake beans, cutting back the tamarillos, opening it up to the light. The photo was after the first pick of ripe tamarillos, enough for the first half a dozen jars of sauce. Equinox is about balance, and the pruning aimed to balance the needs of all the various elements of the forest so they all play nicely together and are kind to each other.

And that’s where my philosophical equinox musings are going this year, into the idea that what makes a community, a food forest of people, all play nicely together and be kind to each other might be a regular hard pruning. Not of people, but of behaviour. The equinox insight is that along with the nurturing and supporting of less dominant elements, it also needs those who would take over pulled back into line, sometimes quite ruthlessly if they are like pumpkins that take all the light and break branches off others in the forrest.

It takes a bit of courage to do hard pruning. But it’s worth it, to keep the balance, so all the various elements have space and light enough to grow and shine.