Endings

The end of our gardening season is here. Tonight it's supposed to reach freezing, which will almost certainly kill our tomatoes and peppers and most of our herbs. Probably the brussel sprouts will survive a light frost, as will the lettuce and a few of our other hardy veggies, but the gardening season is pretty much over. I'm going to miss it. I've loved having fresh veggies, loved having an excuse to go outside and dig in the dirt. I've loved watching Sylvia wander through the garden, letting her pick peas and beans to snack on earlier in the season, lately more tomatillos and tomatoes and the occasional pepper. It's fun to watch her reaction to the different fresh foods--some she eats, some she spits out; she never stops picking them and trying them, no matter how unpleasant the first taste! It's obvious she knows which parts of the plant are meant to be eaten, which is amazing given she's so young. That knowledge must be somehow ingrained in the human psyche by eons of evolution. In the Pleistocene would my small daughter have helped me picking fruits in the forest, or gathering legumes from the edges of the savanna? Do the plants take advantage of our proclivities, or do we take note of theirs?