It’s that time of year again… September!
Here in Michigan, September can be warm, hot, humid, cool, rainy, crisp, or downright confusing. We may be celebrating the beginning of Fall one day and sweating like it’s still July the next. Depending on Mother Nature’s mood, September can feel like the beginning of Fall—or an extension of Summer.
And honestly? I kind of love that
September has always carried a certain feeling for me. It’s a month of transitions, memories, harvest, football, school starting, and—perhaps most importantly in my childhood—
TOMATOES.
Lots and lots and LOTS of tomatoes.
The Tomato Takeover
If you have ever grown tomatoes, you know exactly what happens around this time of year.
For weeks you watch those little green fruits hanging from the plants, wondering when they are FINALLY going to ripen.
Then suddenly…
BOOM.
Tomatoes. Everywhere.
On the kitchen counter. In baskets.
In bowls.
In the refrigerator.
And eventually you're standing at someone's door saying, “Would you like some tomatoes?”
Because there is absolutely no way you're going to eat them all yourself.
September was the month of tomatoes in our garden, and they are woven into my memories of this time of year right alongside school starting and my Dad being completely obsessed with high school and college football.
There is something about a garden tomato that grocery-store tomatoes just can't quite duplicate. That smell when you pick one.
The warmth of it from sitting in the sun.
The juice running down your hand when you cut into it.
That combination of sweet, acidic, earthy, slightly salty goodness.
And maybe it's because I've grown food myself, but I don't think a tomato is just a tomato. It's the result of an entire season of growing.
Seed. Soil. Water. Sun. Flowers.
Pollination. Patience. And finally…
HARVEST.
That's pretty damn magical if you ask me.
Wait… Tomatoes Are FRUIT?!
Here's your September fun fact: Botanically speaking, a tomato is a fruit. Yep.
All those years of hearing about fruits and vegetables and putting tomatoes firmly into the vegetable category?
Technically wrong.
A botanical fruit develops from the flower of a plant and contains seeds. Tomatoes check both boxes.
Culinarily, however, we treat tomatoes like vegetables because we usually use them in savory dishes—salads, sauces, soups, sandwiches, salsa, pizza, and approximately 47,000 other delicious things.
So tomatoes live in that wonderfully confusing space where science says fruit and the kitchen says vegetable.
And honestly, I think that's very tomato of them.
Why choose one box when you can live between two worlds? Perhaps that's another reason I love them.
They are literally a little reminder that categories aren't always as rigid as we think they are.
Tomato Nutrition: Pretty Isn't the Only Magic
Tomatoes aren't just colorful and delicious. They're also packed with nutrients.
They're naturally low in calories and provide vitamin C, vitamin A, potassium, folate, and vitamin K, along with fiber and a variety of plant compounds.
One of the most famous tomato compounds is lycopene, a carotenoid responsible for much of the red color in ripe tomatoes.
Lycopene is an antioxidant, and tomatoes are one of the major dietary sources of it. And here's another interesting little tomato twist:
Cooking tomatoes can make lycopene easier for the body to absorb.
So your fresh tomato salad and your homemade tomato sauce aren't necessarily competing—they're simply offering different ways to enjoy the plant.
And adding a little healthy fat, such as olive oil, can also help with absorption of lycopene. So yes…
That bowl of homemade tomato sauce?
There might be a little nutritional alchemy happening in the kitchen.
The Mystical Tomato
Now let's get into the really fun stuff. Because tomatoes have a fascinating history.
Tomatoes originated in the Americas, with their early history connected to western South America and later cultivation in Mesoamerica. They eventually made their way across the Atlantic after European contact.
And they didn't immediately receive a warm welcome everywhere. In parts of Europe, tomatoes were initially viewed with suspicion.
There were concerns about whether they were safe to eat, partly because tomatoes belong to the nightshade family.
Their botanical relatives include potatoes, peppers, and eggplants—and some members of the nightshade family contain toxic compounds.
But the tomato fruit itself became an important food crop, and over time it went from suspicious newcomer to culinary superstar.
Talk about a glow-up.
Love, Passion & the Tomato
Tomatoes have also accumulated associations with love, passion, fertility, abundance, and sensuality in various cultural traditions and modern folklore.
And look at the tomato! It's red.
It's juicy.
It's full of seeds.
It grows from a flowering plant.
It literally bursts with abundance.
If you're going to assign a little symbolism to it, I can see why people connected it with passion and fertility.
The tomato's deep red color naturally lends itself to symbolism around vitality, desire, courage, blood, life force, and passion.
And as someone who talks about sensuality, body, food, nature, and a little bit of magic… I'm perfectly happy to let the tomato have its moment.
Garden Magic: Saving Seeds
One of my favorite things about tomatoes is that their magic doesn't have to end when you eat them.
You can save the seeds. You can dry them.
You can plant them again.
And suddenly one season becomes the beginning of another. That's a pretty beautiful metaphor for life.
Something ends. Something is harvested. The seeds remain.
And given the right conditions…
something new grows.
If you save seeds from your garden, you are literally participating in a tiny cycle of continuation. That's gardening.
That's nature.
And if you want to call it a little bit mystical? I'm certainly not going to argue.
The Tomato as a Symbol of Abundance
There is another reason tomatoes feel particularly September-ish to me.
Abundance.
A single tomato plant can produce an astonishing amount of fruit under the right conditions. And that abundance can become almost overwhelming.
But isn't that sometimes how life works?
We spend months planting, tending, waiting, wondering if anything is actually happening. Then suddenly…
HARVEST.
The thing we've been working toward arrives all at once. September is full of that energy.
The garden is saying:
Here. You planted this. You tended this.
You waited for this. Now enjoy it.
And perhaps that is one of September's lessons:
Don't forget to enjoy what you grew.
Not just literally in the garden. But in your life.
The relationships. The skills.
The experiences. The lessons.
The creative projects. The risks you took.
The boundaries you finally established.
The things you started even though you weren't sure where they would lead.
Sometimes we get so focused on planting the next thing that we forget to notice what's already growing.
So Here's to the Tomato
Here's to the weird little fruit that we insist on calling a vegetable. Here's to the tomato plants that take over gardens.
Here's to the tomatoes sitting on kitchen counters.
Here's to tomato sandwiches, salsa, sauce, soup, salads, bruschetta, and eating one straight from the garden with a little salt.
Here's to the seeds hiding inside.
Here's to the sunshine stored in every ripe red orb. Here's to the abundance of September.
And here's to remembering that sometimes the most ordinary things in our gardens have the most extraordinary stories.
Because maybe magic doesn't always look like crystals, candles, moon water, or elaborate rituals.
Sometimes magic looks like dirt under your fingernails. Sometimes it smells like tomato vines.
Sometimes it tastes like a tomato picked five minutes ago.
And sometimes…
magic is simply realizing that the “vegetable” sitting on your kitchen counter is actually a fruit.
And that, my friends, is some seriously delicious garden witchery.