Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween this week! Carving pumpkins don't make it into the CSA lineup owing to their inedibility, though they might be one of the most season-specific items out there! I'm sure you'll be seeing them all over town this week as we approach Halloween. This tradition began with the pagan holiday of Samhain, marking the beginning of the dark half the year at the midway point between autumn equinox and the winter solstice, and its Christian counterpart, Halloween. Both holidays honor the deceased and involve the passage of spirits and ghosts from one realm to another. To ward away evil spirits, people practicing folk Christianity in the British Isles carved large turnips and beets into grotesque lanterns lit with lumps of coal, and, in the 19th century, Irish immigrants to this country found American pumpkins to be well suited to the tradition. Soon enough what we think of as “Halloween” began to be celebrated across the country, with carved jack-o'-lanterns set out on porches decorated with dried cornstalks and gourds.

It's no coincidence that pumpkins, potatoes, butternut squash, and other root vegetables are what we decorate with and eat during October and November—and that these are the traditional vegetables of Thanksgiving dinner. These are the vegetables that were stockpiled for winter in the root cellar, before the advent of easy shipping and the modern industrial food system; in a very real way, these are the vegetables that kept people alive during the dark half of the year. Drawing much of our cultural touchstones from regions with long winters, it is no surprise that they are so encoded in our cultural memory.

The fact that these vegetables in particular are our seasonal favorites is simply a product of the principle of evolution—everything developing its niche to succeed; to every thing, its own season. These fall vegetables are produced by frost-tender plants that have all figured out a way to use the sun's energy from the year's growing season to persist in some way over winter to get a head start next year—potatoes with their starchy tubers sending up shoots when the soil warms; turnips, beets, and carrots ready to sprout a seedstalk first thing in spring. These same strategies allow us to keep them over winter for food; the stored energy nourishing us humans instead of growing a new plant next year.

Cabbage and the other hardy brassica greens are also considered traditional fall vegetables because they grow well in cool weather and do keep a while over winter. However, this cultural memory doesn't account for the fact that different types of plants are at home in different climatic regions (take brussels sprouts, which only taste good when grown in cold climates, yet have made it onto Thanksgiving menus nationwide). There's a reason tomatoes are a big deal around here; likewise, New York and Wisconsin are major cabbage growing areas.

Although most plants CAN be grown in most places, different types of plants thrive in the types of weather patterns found in specific regions at specific times of year. The more out-of-season or the less ideal the growing conditions, the more attention required to keep the plant in its comfortable conditions and the more easily they are knocked off course by weather outside of their comfortable range. Tomatoes and peppers, they just grow here in Virginia's heat, no special attention required; same for the fall crops like squash, potatoes, and sweet potatoes, since they to do all their growing in the heat of the summer. Cabbage and greens, on the other hand, really would love to grow in New York, with a mild summer and long, beautiful fall. Here we get a blazing hot summer followed by a short period of nice October weather quickly becoming too cold and dark for plants to grow. And how many emails have I written over the years about waiting for the exact conditions to seed spinach or the trials and tribulations of growing carrots? They definitely CAN be grown here, and we have had amazing spinach or carrot seasons, but being ill-suited to Virginian conditions it takes some effort and attention to guide them through the times when weather just isn't what they're expecting. I'd say about half the years see reasonable success; and the other years, slim pickings or outright failure. In any case, these are not the crops that we rely on to get us through the lean times.

So as we are immersed in the pumpkin spice everything season, with gourds and winter squash turning up in every major supermarket, and as you get ready to carve those pumpkins, rest assured! You are not participating in the fad of the season. Quite the opposite—you are celebrating culture tied to the botanical world that sustains our lives.