By the middle of October, most of the summer residents have made their last visit to Little Cranberry Island, returning to their active lives in bigger towns and cities.
They are not the only ones moving on. Groups of flickers provide flashes of white, red, taupe and black as they travel south, stopping on the island to find bugs on the ground and in the trees, filling up before flying off on the next leg of their journey. Cedar waxwings descend on Mountain Ash trees in large groups, often eating every last orange berry in sight. Songbirds are passing through on the way to their winter homes, with warblers in their muted feathers; much harder to identify than in the spring. You can still hear a few song sparrows and their white-throated cousins if you know where to look for them, though soon they’ll be gone too. All it takes is one cold morning to inspire the human search for socks, mittens, hats and warmer jackets. Its time to bring out the blaze orange apparel, as deer hunting season has begun.
It is also time to see if there is anything left to harvest…in someone else’s garden.
Foraging is part of the autumn routine. Much of it is done with permission from property owners, but every now and then it occurs from spontaneous temptation during a sunny afternoon walk. Calendula, hydrangeas, snapdragons, and sweet peas are so much prettier when picked from someone else’s garden. Especially if your own is empty. If you don’t have permission, you should at least know from a good authority that the property owners are not coming back to the island.
Fifteen years ago, in October, I spied a bunch of basil plants in the garden near a summer home where I was sure the family had left for the season. I picked most of it and made a lovely batch of pesto, only to see the whole group arrive, a few days later, for Columbus Day weekend! I felt quite sheepish, but I never admitted to helping myself to their basil. I hoped they would blame it on the deer, and I have never foraged there again.
With such a short growing season on the island, gardens reach their maturity in September, after many people have left. The restaurant is closed but in the garden at the Islesford Dock the “sungold” cherry tomatoes are abundant in the greenhouse. Owners Dan and Cynthia Lief often invite their friends to help themselves to the tasty treats, but for the other items in the garden, they like to be there to harvest with you.
At a recent dinner party at their home, we were served fresh berries with balsamic vinegar sauce on vanilla ice cream. The sauce was delicious with many blackberries and a few late-season strawberries. Cynthia explained that the dessert was supposed to be all strawberries, but someone had been to their garden, while they were out of town, and picked them all. Fortunately, a friend stopped by with a pint of strawberries to welcome them home, and Cynthia mixed these with blackberries that she had picked nearby-on someone else’s property.
The tomatoes are a standard crop in the restaurant garden, but the the other vegetables change from year to year. One year there was an amazing crop of Japanese eggplants. The next year the eggplants hardly grew at all. In that off-eggplant season, while my friends were away for the weekend, I helped myself to some cherry tomatoes and decided I would make a ratatouille with some eggplant. I wished there were more, but I only found one that was of any size to use, so I picked it.
The next day, Cynthia came by the house and was pretty miffed; “I know we invite people to help themselves in our garden, but I had one eggplant that I was trying to keep going since none of the others did well, and someone actually took it!” I tried to commiserate with a plain face, “Oh, um, that’s too bad. There was only one there?” Cynthia replied, “I know it shouldn’t be a big deal, and we really do tell people to come and pick, but I never thought someone would take the only eggplant. I just really wanted it. I was waiting for it to get a little bigger.”
At this point, I was the only one who could hear the smallish cucumber-sized eggplant screaming my name from inside my refrigerator. I couldn’t keep the facade. “Okay, I did it. I’m the offender who took your tiny eggplant. I’m so sorry!” Cynthia started laughing and said she was glad to know that I was the one who took it, so she wouldn’t dwell on it. I used the stolen eggplant to garnish a dish of scalloped potatoes that I took to their house. It didn’t provide much of a meal, but it has continued to provide a good laugh over the years. Especially when furtive fall foraging is discussed.
The word “forage” is both a transitive and intransitive verb. Used without an object, (intransitive) it means to “wander or go in search of provisions, to seek, to hunt.” Used with an object, (transitive) it means “to strip of supplies, to pillage, to plunder.” Simply put, some forms of fall foraging are OK, just don’t take the last eggplant.