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To recover an intuitive sense of what will be in season throughout the year, picture a season of foods unfolding as if from one single plant. Take a minute to study this creationβan imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season a cornucopia of all the different vegetable products we can harvest. Weβll call it a vegetannual. Picture its life passing before your eyes like a time-lapse film: first, in the cool early spring, shoots poke up out of the ground. Small leaves appear, then bigger leaves. As the plant grows up into the sunshine and the days grow longer, flower buds will appear, followed by small green fruits. Under midsummerβs warm sun, the fruits grow larger, riper, and more colorful. As days shorten into the autumn, these mature into hard-shelled fruits with appreciable seeds inside. Finally, as the days grow cool, the vegetannual may hoard the sugars its leaves have made, pulling them down into a storage unit of some kind: a tuber, bulb, or root.
So goes the year. First the leaves: spinach, kale, lettuce, and chard (here, thatβs April and May). Then more mature heads of leaves and flower heads cabbage, romaine, broccoli, and cauliflower (MayβJune). Then tender young fruit-set: snow peas, baby squash, cucumbers (June), followed by green beans, green peppers, and small tomatoes (July). Then more mature, colorfully ripened fruits: beefsteak tomatoes, eggplants, red and yellow peppers (late JulyβAugust). Then the large, hard-shelled fruits with developed seeds inside: cantaloupes, honeydews, watermelons, pumpkins, winter squash (AugustβSeptember). Last come the root crops, and so ends the produce parade.
Plainly these donβt all come from the same plant, but each comes from a plant, thatβs the pointβa plant predestined to begin its life in the spring and die in the fall. (A few, like onions and carrots, are attempting to be biennials, but weβll ignore that for now.) Each plant part we eat must come in its turnβleaves, buds, flowers, green fruits, ripe fruits, hard fruitsβbecause that is the necessary order of things for an annual plant. For the life of them, they canβt do it differently.
Some minor deviations and a bit of overlap are allowed, but in general, picturing an imaginary vegetannual plant is a pretty reliable guide to what will be in season, wherever you live. If you find yourself eating a watermelon in April, you can count back three months and imagine a place warm enough in January for this plant to have launched its destiny.
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