Gardeners can extend growing season into the fall

Just when you thought the gardening season was over, fall arrives to prove you wrong.

Many believe we hang up our trowels on Labor Day, as if Mother Nature slammed the garden gate on us. Not so fast! There are at least two more months of pleasant, productive gardening weather.

This bonus gardening season, starting during a socially-distanced mid-August, is a happy surprise - a "second summer" for both the currently estimated 30 million U.S. gardeners, as well as the 18 million new ones who took up the hobby during the initial COVID-19 lockdown.

For those who missed out last spring, you still have time to start a vegetable patch (cooler weather and fewer bugs, too). Sown or transplanted now, a fall garden will abound in flowers; sweet Asian cabbage; lettuce and radish; broccoli, cauliflower and greens; root vegetables and herbs - all before Thanksgiving.

Some of us tend to view the months after August with foreboding, envisioning a season of darkness and decline - a chilly farewell to blooming flowers, a vegetative requiem, an ominous prelude to winter's cold and long nights. Not quite.

Fall is not an end but a beginning - a season of complex initiatives and burgeoning power, not of fading glory. COVID-19 shouldn't deter but rather encourage outdoor family fun and nutritious harvests.

As fall nears, the plant kingdom becomes its most creative: rearranging, reallocating, restoring, and preparing energy and food reserves for the winter and spring.

Autumn's perceived decline is just the opposite. Behind poignant scenery, plants, bushes and trees are hard at work, switching from flowering and photosynthesis to reproduction, ripening, and the dispersion of thousands of seeds - and that's from an average backyard. The seeds of fall ensure the future.

The "amber waves of grain" are vast resurrection machines.

Nowadays, we tend to gauge our progress in terms of technological advances. Yet seeds put our high-tech marvels to shame. No surprise there: they got a 350 million year head start. Imagine a microchip - or a robot, if you like - which, equipped with needed nutrition and a protective shell for surviving, proceeds to produce millions of identical chips, each of which then becomes a new, slightly varied replica of its original self.

But we can't survive on microchips alone. The difference is that seeds are alive. Their reproduction is essential to both the endurance and continuity of the plant and its species.

For humankind and nearly all life on Earth, seeds, and the myriad foods made from them, are the lifeblood and, perhaps, the genesis of our existence and survival.

These very same seeds can help focus the attention of restless students housebound by the continuing COVID pandemic.

The autumn garden is the ultimate three-dimensional outdoor classroom, rewarding patience and care with tangible results: fresh, nutritious and tasty homegrown produce and the magic of ornamental plants.

Here is an education that can last more than one school year - the pleasures of gardening are lifelong.

We shall rightly perceive spring as a miracle after enduring the long nights of winter. Remember that "spring" was set, and first came to life, during the biologically active months in the autumn garden, to which you are warmly invited.

• George Ball, chairman of W. Atlee Burpee Company and past president of The American Horticultural Society, is a former Glen Ellyn resident.