The first cold morning always catches me. Not the temperature so much as the fact that I've forgotten what to do about it. Somewhere in August I stopped owning a sweater. Now it's late September, the light comes in flat and gold instead of straight down, and I'm standing in the field at seven with cold hands wondering where the gloves went.
That's the whole month, really. Not the new season yet. The adjustment to it.
What the plant does about it
The ashwagandha doesn't seem to mind. It has a plan for this. After the small green flowers finish, each one closes into a papery husk, the same lantern shape as a tomatillo (they're cousins). All summer the husks stay green and you'd hardly notice. Then, right about now, they go orange, the berry inside goes red, and the whole field looks strung with tiny lanterns.
That's the plant announcing the transition. Whatever it had to spend up top, it has spent. From here on, everything goes down. Between now and the first hard cold, it pulls what it can out of the leaves and packs it into the root, and the root gets denser, heavier, more itself.
We don't dig for a few more weeks, and that's on purpose. The plant is still adjusting. If you go in early, you get a bigger-looking plant with a lighter root. Wait, and you get the thing we actually want. The lesson isn't subtle. When the season turns, the work moves somewhere you can't see, and the right move is to let it.
Cold hands, cold feet
Here's the part of the transition that people write to us about most in the fall. The mornings get cold and their hands and feet get cold with them, and stay that way, and they'd like to know if the root does anything for it.
It does, and it's one of the oldest things said about it. In Ayurveda, ashwagandha is classed as a warming herb. It's the root you take when the body runs cold and thin and tired, to build heat from the inside rather than pile on layers from the outside. We hear it from customers every year around now: a few weeks in, the feet aren't ice at bedtime anymore, the hands come back faster after the morning chores. Nothing dramatic. Just the body making its adjustment a little more easily than it would have alone.
If you've read the older posts, you know we don't make big claims. This is a tonic, taken daily, over weeks. But the warmth is real, and September is the month to start so the body's caught up by the time it's actually cold.
The moon that rises early
The Harvest Moon has its own trick for the transition. Every full moon rises around sunset, but for a few nights on either side of this one, the moon comes up only twenty or thirty minutes later each evening instead of the usual fifty, because of the shallow angle it climbs at this time of year. Several nights in a row, the sky never quite goes dark between sundown and moonrise.
Farmers used that. Before headlights, this was the week you could keep hauling after supper because there was light to do it by. The moon didn't shrink the work. It gave you a little more room to get it done. That's what a good adjustment looks like: not less to carry, but a bit more light to carry it in.
Plant friend for the Harvest Moon: Ashwagandha
The flagship, and the right bottle for the turn. Ashwagandha has been used for thousands of years as a tonic for people who have more to carry than the day has hours for. Traditionally taken in the evening. Warming from the inside. The bottle we reach for when the season changes and we'd like to change with it instead of fighting it.
The bottles on the shelf right now are from last fall's roots, made fresh within a day of digging, and they've had a year to settle. The new harvest is a few weeks out. If you're due to restock, this is the month, before we're up to our elbows in dirt.
Go outside on the 25th if the clouds allow. Watch it come up over the east hills, big and orange. Bring a sweater. You'll forget again next year too.
Relax into strength.
Warm ashwagandha wishes,
Jeff and the farm team
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
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