O! Autumn Comes...

There once was a path; frost took it away!

O! Autumn comes on purple feet

With falling scarlet tresses,

She dazzles us with bronze and gold

Upon her dancing dresses;

Sometimes she smiles in warm delight

Sometimes she blows and sighs

And other times she draws in tight

Tears flowing, as she cries.

O! Autumn longs for Summer’s touch,

Who left her lone and cold;

And yet she hurries along the path

Towards bold raw Winter’s hold;

But while she tarries, before she marries,

Fall glories do unfold

We breathe in deeply her marvels sweetly:

Englamoured by her craft.

Pre-frost flowers

You can tell this is a poem because it starts with O!; I’m making fun of poems from earlier centuries, when O! would set you up to expect an emotional, overburdened poem from the quivering sensitive poet’s spiritually rendered heart.  The last line does rhyme, barely, with “path,” but by the time you get there, your ear won’t hear it. Now you know.

Kinda like my brain won’t hear the truth: we had our first, killing frost 2 nights ago, and it laid waste to the nasturtiums, and beans, and glorious morning glories. You can again see my compost bins, and now they’re filled with, rather than swamped by, morning glory vines. I can see right into the center of the garden now, including the empty bed that the damned chipmunks cleared of parsnips overnight the night before the frost. They must have had a big party, because the next day I pulled the last 5 roots and dug through the bed, finding nary a one of even partially consumed roots, of the dozens that had filled it anon. And now I know.

Pre-frost Love Lies Bleeding

Yes, anon’s a misuse of another poetic-like word, so when you read the above paragraph, pronounce “damned chipmunks” as “dam-ned chipmunks,” pretend anon means recently instead of soon, and that you’re wearing a long dress and silk shawl or a morning coat and silken ascot, are standing by a rain-swept very long window with a small book of poetry in your hand, as you sigh at the spiritual insights and pain of the poet. After such near-total destruction, verbal as well as chipmunkal, we might as well make hash of the rest.

Sigh. I like parsnips, but I LOVE wintered-over parsnips. Last year the mice got ‘em and I got none; this year the chipmunks have broken my heart. I have one small patch of parsnips still flourishing in the raised bed near the house, and I’m hoping against likelihood that the damned chipmunks don’t find it. So far all they’ve done in that bed is steal bites out of tomatoes and hollow out a couple of giant, ripening peppers, but they haven’t done any tunneling there, so maybe, maybe, maybe… Just let me add that if you’ve never eaten an over-wintered parsnip, you’ve never really tasted the glories of parsnip. It’s like a different vegetable, and you can’t imagine what happens to it after spending a frozen winter below ground.

The last gladiolas

 

What amazes me most is that the cosmos, some of it, and the calendula, all of it, and the Love Lies Bleeding, and the anemones and dahlias and raspberries and a few of the potted plants, including the passion flower, survived the frost, which tipped even the pepper plants nearest the house which I’d covered with remay (a woven garden cloth) against the frost. 

During the day I’d gathered masses of nasturtiums and all the other garden flowers, along with the last hydrangea and hibiscus and okra blossoms, and a big vase of the darkly-purple-leaved scarlet Love Lies Bleeding that got planted late and so has only begun to bleed and hasn’t laid down yet; and all the potential gladiola flower stalks, which I’m not sure will develop and bloom in a vase, but we’ll see. The dining table is covered with flowers, now, and I can’t see the Husband over them when he sits opposite me. Catman thinks I’ve brought him an herbaceous feast.

The catnip, by the way, is still flourishing in the garden, and spreading new babies everywhere. Talk about annoying.

The new Harvest Person at the dog park in Enfield.

 

There is something satisfying about cleaning out the garden, piling the armloads and mounds of finished plants into the compost bins, praising them for their summer bounty and wishing them well in their new journey. It’s rained more than it’s been sunny during these two weeks of my vacation, so the going’s been slow but steady work. As I go, I’ve been planting a few spring bulbs, cussing the chipmunks as I do, fingers crossed that they won’t munch them as little else remains in the garden, and hoping they go to their winter dens and stay put soon. I’ve put down more pavers and bricks in the wet, and cut down scarlet runner vines in the wet, finding, as always, huge pods of lovely beans that I couldn’t see amongst the masses of twisted and twined vines. I’m still not entirely finished; the fava beans don’t mind cool weather, though it’s getting colder enough that they aren’t doing much very fast and I’ll probably yank them out soon. I’ve wrested the remains of the last two rows of carrots from the chipmunks, finding half of them half-eaten; there are still celeriac plants to pull, and a giant artichoke plant that hasn’t bloomed but looks large and healthy yet; and the flowers that avoided the frost, and the two pepper plants near the house, still loaded with little peppers. 

Inside, the Christmas cactuses are setting blooms. Does anyone have a Christmas cactus that actually blooms near Christmas? Mine always burst into bloom around Hallowe’en. The bay and kaffir lime and tender hibiscus are trying to get used to cramped quarters, again, and I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to bring the old passion flower vine in or let it go and start over with a baby. Right now it’s out – I’m hoping its 3 buds will bloom before I have to make the decision or a freeze makes it for me.

One of my butternuts has already become soup, a full basket of winter squashes and pumpkins – the latter bought from another grower, thanks to the damned chipmunks who tunneled under my pumpkin plant and killed it – as they did my poppy plants – just as it was getting ready to bloom. Are you sensing a theme, here? – resides under the dining room table. The onions and potatoes, both of which matured early this year, are already half gone. But the smaller freezer is filled with bags and bags of tomatoes, beans, corn, beets, and peppers. I’ve never seen so many peppers, nor so many on one plant, nor such tall pepper plants – a couple reached 4 feet! 

Some of the squashes under the table

It was a strange and truly weird growing season. My asparagus – until this year, three or four spindly stalks that somehow moved from a long-gone bed 10 feet away to the end of the new bed where I grow scarlet runner beans – this year have become a small multitude, and produced a bush of fern that still is beautifully green and lush. The fall raspberries started mid-summer, stopped, and now are producing incredible numbers of flowers and keeping the bees, which are very slow in the cold air, busy busy busy.  The peach tree half died. The apples were mealy and horrid. My pear produced, for the first time, a dozen or so pears. The scarlet runner beans made roots that were as big around, and longer in stretch, than my carrots, which (when not gnawed on) were huge. And one whole bed of carrots produced flowers, instead of carrots – pretty much a genetic impossibility, carrots being biennials. The largest sunflowers were at least a month before their time, and okra blooming in mid-October in NH? Unheard of. Ditto the small summer squashes that I finally ended a few days ago.

Can't get much more gorgeous!

Today is another very cold, wet day – too cold to brave the garden. My feet are frosty, and I turned the heat up to 63, this morning. I’m going to try to stay in and sew buttons that fell off months ago back on, and hem a pair of pants I’ve had for a year and never worn.

Ticks are back – I’ve pulled three off Catman in the last week. Squooshed the nasty pests and flushed them down the toilet. Too bad we can’t as easily rid ourselves of the horrible, pathology-spreading pest infecting the White House and his cohorts in the Administration and Legislature. Don’t forget to vote. We're all Witnesses.

For the blog: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com

All photos Deb Marshall

October 15, 2018

Below: Two views of a very haunted house in Enfield, October 2018.