Today is Lammas, Lughnasadh in the Southern hemisphere. It’s the end of the long lazy days of summer holiday, and the start of the autumn season of bringing in the harvest. It’s the start of the season where you reap what you have sown.
I like the seasonal calendar of solstices and equinoxes and the “cross quarter days” that are the midpoints between them. For gardeners, they create markers that forewarn you of the season. Otherwise the seasons sneak up on you. Although today is very hot here, the season coming is not the one for heat lovers like zucchini and eggplants and chilis, but one for leafy greens and things like coriander and parsley and silver beet, leeks and carrots and fennel – plants I want to slow down and not be in such a hurry to bolt to seed. Today I’ll get the seed box out and put the summer seeds away and the new season seeds out.
If you look at day lengths on a graph, it’s a bell curve. It’s flatter overall the closer you get to the equator, but it’s also nearly flat as it passes through the solstices. You probably haven’t noticed the days shortening since the summer solstice – till now the difference is so small, you need to really be measuring to see it. The cross-quarter days mark the points when the curve suddenly steepens. From now on the days will shorten fast, and if you are food producing that’s important to know because it’s what plants use to tell what season it is.
But there’s another reason I like them. They create a little moment with a prompt for reflection, to focus on the things that are important but not urgent, the things that otherwise just get pushed aside for another day for years on end.
Lughnasadh is marks the start of the autumn harvest season, and I notice it in the garden. I am giving away eggplants and snake beans, tromboncino and zucchini and cucumbers. The Lughnasadh prompt, I think, is a reflection on the intersection of luck and just rewards. Lughnasadh is a moment to celebrate achievement – it always seems appropriate to me that the Australian of the Year is announced just in time for it. It’s a moment to stop and be proud of yourself, proud of others. You reap what you have sown, if you are lucky, if you have sown good stuff – forethought, effort, restraint, generosity, justice, compassion. Or unlucky if what you have sown is the opposite. Perhaps not every season, and it’s important to acknowledge and be grateful for the luck in it, but odds yield over time.
