Frost!

Fall harvest: yellow plum tomatoes cherry tomatoes, red peppers, broccoli shoots, heritage tomatoes...

Frost blasts tender leaves and vines, turns them from green, growing things into black, dried-up wilting things. But also, when it’s not a hard frost, it will enliven other growing things, spark their heat-weary growth, cause them to rebloom and make their colors more brilliant. 

My Icelandic poppies have started to bloom again, like bright stars in the garden. The gladiolus are brighter than ever, and the fava beans are relieved to have better temperatures for producing fruit, the only bean I know that likes cool air, cool soil. Apples are much tastier after a good frost; the pumpkins are ripening, my pears are, some of them, ready to pick:  I have one perfect pear sitting here on the plate next to my computer.  And fortunately, my peppers and tomatoes were left untouched, and I was able to pick two red peppers this afternoon, which is a minor miracle in my cold-pocket environment.

Pears!

It would seem like this time of year there would be less to do in the garden, but in fact, there’s a kind of big push right now to get done all that can be done. New perennials need to be planted, but not too soon or they’ll exhaust their roots or bulbs putting out foliage now, and not too late or the ground will be frozen.  Weeds are busy making seeds as fast as they can manage, and these need to be yanked and composted to save woe and work in the spring. The day after the frost – September 19 – I needed to pull out the blasted green bean plants and pull off the still very tasty beans for one last meal, before stuffing the compost bins full of the plant detritus. Carrots and other root vegetables need to be harvested before a serious frost – or insects gorging before winter – eat up their foliage and make the roots harder to find. Pumpkins and winter squashes will need to be brought in as soon as the vines are completely dead. I leave those that have a few untouched leaves on them to produce flowers for the bees for as long as possible.

Post-frost pumpkin flower

Pears need to be checked daily for readiness to be picked, as do the tomatoes, and scarlet runner beans.  I’ll need to enlist the help of the Tall Dude soon – I can’t reach most of the pears this year. Pots need to be emptied, dried, and stored with tomato cages and other garden paraphernalia in the shed. Some soft paths need more cedar chips; the new wind thingy needs a pebble bed; raspberry canes need to be cut back, and the new raspberries need some serious weeding. And the fall raspberries – ours are a yellow variety that this fall are huge and luscious – also need to be checked daily for handfuls of tasty fruit that sometimes need to be wrestled away from the stinkbugs or wasps.

Fall raspberries

And even while the garden is slowly denuded of its warm-weather plants, there are still spots of incredible beauty that we need to pause and admire and sniff, sniff, sniff.

I’ve been making bouquets of amaranth flowers and small sunflowers the past two weeks, putting them into quart canning jars, and giving them away to strangers and friends. The amaranth leaves, an incredible burgundy color, were partly hit by the frost, and a stronger frost will destroy the flowers – so, surprise bouquets. Mostly I don’t see who comes across them and carries them home, but one lady to whom I gave one of the bouquets I was carrying in the back of the car, at the post office, gave me a hug – an excellent and unexpected payment. I’ve given away about nine bouquets  to unknown recipients so far and it makes me happy to think nine people had a reason to smile unexpectedly during the last couple of horrible weeks.

Love Lies Bleeding

I also found a home for my gigantic coral Love Lies Bleeding plants, which self-seeded from last year’s crop. The café downstairs from my office in White River Jct. has taken these 5’7” giants and is using them as decoration instead of cornstalks – and the nice thing is, these massive flowers can be dried and will be attractive for many months. I literally had to saw them down – the stalk s are 2+ inches in diameter – and driving them to the Upper Valley was interesting. The stalks  and green leaves lounged across the passenger seat with their feet in a bucket of water, and the long, long flower cascades draped across the back seat, as if I had a mermaid in the car with me. Only two would fit at a time – the last two will go with me tomorrow.

French pumpkin hanging from a compost bin

The hardy hibiscus and Speedwell Veronica are in full, beautiful bloom, and the autumn clematis is spread across a large section of the back fence, and in fragrant, wonderful bloom. This plant has small white flowers and looks like a white froth on the fence; its fragrance hits you as you get near. The Bells of Ireland I planted this summer – an annual that I’ve never planted before – didn’t get very tall, but, oh my, the fragrance! As they’re tender, I’ve brought most of them in and I’ve been thrilled to discover that the fragrance lasts for some time even once dried. And my scented gladioulus are also filling my dining room with perfume. These plants look wholly unlike the glads we all know – they have graceful swooping necks with star-shaped white flowers that look like swan’s necks and heads before opening, and a maroon star-shaped marking on the inside. 

Autumn clematis

My calla lilies have migrated back indoors, and the bay tree and kaffir lime and not-hardy hibiscus have moved temporarily to the back wart, where it’s a little more protected and a little warmer. They’ll be coming in under protest soon – probably this weekend, whether they like it or not, as will the rosemary plant. I still need to put the miniature rose into the garden somewhere – it turns out that often they’ll grow in place and return next year – and I’m busy making and placing identifying plant markers so I don’t pull things I shouldn’t in the spring or plant new perennials on top of old ones. And that means I spend a fair amount of time wandering around the garden with my ineptly-created map, wondering out loud: is that the heart-leafed bergenia, or is that it over there, and which of the three is the blue-eyed…whatchamacallit? And where, exactly, did the fritillaria that emerged this spring actually emerge? Why didn’t I mark it then? And the alliums, too? And the tulips?

And, oh look – the dill has self-seeded and some of it’s up high enough to pull and use as dill weed – a bonus fall treat. And the Eygyptian onions, which I totally pulled up and ate a bunch of and then replanted many of the bulbs, is up and getting big again.

One of the giant coral Love Lies Bleeding - Charley Freiberg photo

When I look out the window now at the back forty, all the big  sunflower heads are bowed with the weight of their seeds which are ripening; a few tall – 7’ and higher – amaranth still glow burgundy; the maple trees at the edge of the field are in full, blazing scarlet and poppy; I can see some pathways I couldn’t see for many weeks; the blueberry leaves are turning bright red, and there are still piles of bricks and rocks and rock-like chunks that need placing in several projects I’ve been working on this summer. And several more projects I’ve been planning but waiting for cooler weather to work on. 

And so much still to do…and isn’t that a perfect blessing?

For the blog, 26 September 2019

Most photos Deb Marshall

Many colors of fall Bachelor's Buttons

 

September!!

Hardy Hibiscus, finally in bloom!

 

September. The rain we needed in July is happening again today. That’s ok, because I needed to make pasta sauce with the ripe paste tomatoes, but it’s also cold, which is slowing down the tomato-ripening. And that’s  ok, because it’s easier to sleep in cool weather, and it’s easier to do the kinds of work in the garden that involves hauling around heavy things and crawling around under blueberry bushes to chop stuff out – except that it’s raining. So I’m not.

My current list of things to do in the garden includes:

• Finish putting bricks in front of the garage, after The Husband fetches more bricks from the pile of abandoned, used ones a friend said we could scavenge

• Tie up the trumpet vine and wisteria vine

• Manure and mulch the clematis



Fall bouquets of gladiolus, amaranth, Bells

• Fix the end of the soft pathway into the field - pavers, bricks, something, but do some serious weeding first

• Redo the old potato-bag space and finish the new potato-bag space The Husband started – get half cement blocks, dig up the weeds between it and the old wall, prepare it for planting next spring

• Plant the miniature rose that’s on the wart



Beautiful okra blossoms

• Put pavers and pebbles around the new wind-thingy so it doesn’t fall over this winter

• Finish fertilizing the fruit trees and raspberries

• Cut out old raspberry canes as soon as they’re done producing

• Mulch old raspberry bed with new hay and new raspberry bed with straw, and come up with some sort of fencing for latter



Lots and lots of apples this year!

• Finish putting down cardboard mulch and covering with cedar chips in the blueberries

• Re-cedar the soft path en

• Ask the Barkie Boys’ ashes if they’re ready to go live outside, or if they need another winter inside near the couch. Don’t cry while doing this.

• When it’s just a little cooler (and dryish) bring the indoor plants indoors, and bring in also the solar lights on the wart and in the garden

• When it's even cooler, dump the annuals into the compost bins and store the pots once they’ve dried out

• Finish the new garage east-wall planting area; it needs something



The owl and the Bells of Ireland

• Order perennials and plant them when they come

• Figure out where  to put them first, which means make that perennial map I’ve been avoiding all summer

• Mark the perennials so I don’t weed them out next spring like I suspect I did last spring, and so I don’t plant over them with new perennials – use cheap chopsticks? And the map – make the damned map, already!

• Keep picking and processing tomatoes, runner beans, summer squashes, green beans, and  greens as they’re ready, continue to monitor the winter squashes and when they’re ready, pick them for storage, and don’t forget the remaining parsley root, carrots, and beets

•  Yank out veg plants that are no longer productive and add to compost bins

• Turn the square in front of the dragon into a cedar-chipped interesting spot

•  Store bean towers and tomato cages and pots and wart furniture and so on, don’t forget the hoses!



Scarlet runner and fava beans

•  Keep weeding

• Put lots of wood chips under the apple tree. Nag The Husband about making wood chips. Nag again. And again…

• Pick the pears – how does one tell they’re ready, again? Enlist the Tall Dude to help, I’ll never reach them all

•  Pick and dry the remaining Bells of Ireland – sniff sniff sniff, incredible fragrance!

• Don’t forget to pull and dry the gladiola corms when they’re done

• Make the corn experiment spot more permanent



The first fruit of the corn experiment. Other veggies in shot for size comparison!

• Start to weed out some of that marjoram that’s ‘way too vigorous

• Put out stakes so snowplows don’t run into blueberries and rock-like-things walls

• Weed some more

• Get wrap and wrap the trunks of the new fruit trees so the field mice don’t feast on them this winter

Well, that’s part of it, and that’s only the main things on the outdoors list. Clearly, some of those things won’t need to be done right away, but September’s melting away faster than expected!

This is the time of year when everything in Nature seems to be hesitating, and listening carefully, carefully. The cricket song has changed, the bird song is changing and some have left us already, as have some butterflies and other insects. There’s a sweet contented feeling in patches of sun, my garden toad family seems to be very busy, and you can almost hear pumpkins and winter squash ripening.

This unknown plant sprung up in my green bean bed. I can't seem to get a good picture of it, which makes me think it was planted by aliens. I've never seen the flower - you can see a blur of leftover yellow petal - but it makes these interesting pods afterward. The heart-shaped leaves belong to it.  If anyone knows what it is, please tell me!

I think that Buzzy Boy has migrated, but one of the Buzzys is still here – I’m assuming Buzzy Girl; I get buzzed when I’m in the garden near the scarlet runner beans, especially, but the buzzer isn’t holding still long enough for me to come up out of my bend, locate the buzzer, and get glasses on so I can see if there’s a red throat or not. Buzzy Boy would usually wait so we could lock eyes. But then, his feeder is still emptying pretty quickly, so I’m not sure. Whoever it is, they’ll be gone soon, the light and temperature has changed and little tiny birds won’t be able to subsist here much longer.

My freezers are filling quickly, and the big sunflowers, at least, are heavy-headed with seeds. There are many bees still busy, busy, very very busy amongst the beans and smaller, many-flowered sunflowers, the cosmos and calendula, the scarlet runner flowers, the marjoram flowers, the fall raspberries and the fall flowers that are just starting to open or are long bloomers – asters, fall clematis, goldenrod, tansy, gladiolas, speedwell  veronica, lady’s thumb, hardy hibiscus, helenium, anemone, Black-eyed Sue, some late wild daisies, Lady’s Thumb, foxglove, pincushion flower, Love Lies Bleeding, thyme and mint, and the ever-taller, still beautiful, amaranth.

I fished out my fall scarf  today, and the silk wrapped ‘round my chilly neck is comforting and warming. Time to get out all the scarves, and maybe even the fingerless mittens. I expect we’ll have warm, maybe even humid, weather again this season before we’re done, but in this part of the world, you can’t be sure.

In the meantime: glorious, gorgeous world, with maples starting to flare, and the smell of warm earth and vegetation starting to die back and become humus. Wood stacks grow, the Enfield Harvest People are starting to arrive, apples are ripe and ready, and even my corn experiment has produced one small ear with pretty normal-sized kernels – amazing!

And there’s an amazing, orange baby toad in my garden. September can be magical.

 

 

The amazing, baby orange toad on a mottled summer squash leaf

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All photos Debra Marshall

 

 

 

I Love My Garden

Multi-colored Morning Glories

September 2

This is a lovely time of year, except that my dear friend and her father, as well as most people who live for incomprehensible reasons down in the lower part of the country, are sitting around in a house with barricaded windows, listening, listening, listening….to see if the wind’s picking up.

A view from the far side of the fence

Up here in the real world, however, we’ve just had a lovely rain, the nights are cool enough to be comfortable, the days are warm enough to be pleasant and cool enough to get some real work done, and the garden’s starting to cough up ripe tomatoes in enough quantity to start freezing some most days, and the shell beans, except for the scarlet runners, are done, the green beans are starting to produce their second-wind crop, and while I think I’ve vanquished the evil squash bugs in the summer squash and zucchini plants, they seem to have moved into the French pumpkin vines. Honestly? I’ve made forays into the pumpkin vines and squished and stomped a whole bunch of the nasty bugs, but I’m less exercised about them being there because the plant is MASSIVE. It’s the pumpkin version of last year’s morning glories, which swallowed two compost bins, a bean tower, a pathway, and part of the fence before frost finally destroyed them.

The pumpkin vines have taken over two larger compost bins, 3 pathways, the leek bed, and are headed for the beet bed and zucchini plant in one direction, and the garden shed in the other. In the process it’s climbed the remains of the peach tree, several sunflowers and tomato cages, and, of course, the big compost bins. There are pumpkins in the tree, in the compost bin, in the leeks, in the field, hanging from tomato cages, climbing amaranth. 

Morning Glories in the pear tree

This year’s morning glories have climbed the pear tree and the cherry tree, and there’s one self-seeded vine trying to take over its old compost bin territory, as well. The flowers in the trees are quite lovely, and somehow I managed to plant mixed-color morning glories this year, which are really nice. 

The corn experiment tasseled, and against all odds, have started to make 4 or 5 ears of corn. If the weather gods cooperate long enough, I might actually get a small meal of home-grown corn in, say, maybe October?  The weird little tuber-like thing I planted that came from a mail-order plant place and is supposed to be a perennial sunflower has produced a four-foot-high plant, and it’s in the process of producing flower buds. Doesn’t look exactly like a sunflower, and doesn’t exactly not look like one, either. None of the buds have opened yet, but if I were to make a guess, I’d say it’s a Jerusalem artichoke plant. Which is sorta, kinda like a sunflower, and sorta, kinda perennial, but if that’s what the plant nursery meant to send me, I’m sorta, kinda not impressed. 

Maximillian perennial sunflower, or Jerusalem Artichoke?

I like this time of year partly because I like the tidying-up part – I enjoy cutting back foliage that’s dying or shading out other things, I like pulling up spent plants, and by this time of year I’m getting sick of the constant processing of foods. Today, rainy and cool, was a great day to make zucchini relish, a two-day job that also requires the hot job of canning the relish.  It was cool enough to enjoy the stove being on most the day, and rainy enough that I wasn’t tempted to go out to the garden for anything. While I waited for the relish to relish and the filled jars to process, I made a curried veggie soup, and a corn chowder with the remains of last year’s frozen corn; and processed a dozen more ears of corn for freezing. 

This is the time of year when tomatoes need to be frozen, or made into sauce, pretty much daily; when there are beans to shell most nights; when the summer squashes need to be made into pies. The broccoli sproutlets become quiche or soup, carrots and beets get roasted, last year’s last bag of shell beans becomes chili.

The gladiolas are in bloom, and the Bells of Ireland are sweet and lovely. The self-seeded salmon-colored Love Lies Bleeding has a stem like a tree, so thick and strong; the scarlet Love Lies Bleeding is pooling its flowers on the ground. Strange and interesting unknown plants have shown up in the middle of the beets, in the middle of the pear’s perennial garden, in the middle of the green beans. The bees are busy, busy, busy, and Buzzy Boy and his kin will be leaving soon for their long trip south. He paused and hovered in front of the kitchen window, today, during a break in the rain, peering in to see what I was up to. After he flew off, I hustled out to check the hummer feeders, and discovered they were almost empty, so I made some fresh food for him. Don’t leave until after the hurricane’s finished, Buzzy, please!

French pumpkins taking over the garden

 Sept 9

I put the flannel sheets back on my bed this morning, so you can be certain we’ll soon have hot and humid weather again. Don’t take your air conditioners out of the windows yet!

I love my garden. My garden isn’t relaxing – because I grow most the vegetables we eat through the year, planting has to happen when it’s time, despite the weather; vegetables have to be harvested and processed when they’re ready, whether I feel like it or not; weeds have to be yanked, bugs have to be conquered, and my garden’s a little too big for someone who also works full time to  take care of it easily. There’s never time to just sit and contemplate it.

 

But part of what I love about the garden is the stuff I can’t control, and how it’s different every year. I haven’t planted California poppies or dill in years, and yet every year there are plenty of each. This year my giant sunflowers are small-flowered but tall with many branches and blooms, and the shorter sunflowers are giant-flowered. There’s a toad family living somewhere in the garden – I’ve seen two adults and a bunch of little thumb-nail-sized babies. My Buzzy Boy and Ms Buzzy are still very busy amongst the scarlet runner bean flowers, and still herd me back to the house at dusk. Black-eyed Susans, daisies, and white violets have emerged from somewhere and make themselves comfy here and there in the garden, and every year – and every week – things change.

Cedar waxwings share the blueberry patch, swallows and dragon flies sweep through the garden snatching up flying bugs. I never know for certain who I’ll meet in the garden, and the bouquets that come out of it are always gorgeous. My French pumpkins have turned their light pink  color, and are starting to make the warty lines that the sugars form on the outside of the shell as they ripen. 

The sugar warts starting to form on the pumpkins

This time of year I’m tired, and sick of it, but man, I still love it. And I’ll be very sorry when it’s over. I hope we have a long, comfortably warm autumn. And I hope at some point I get the chance to just sit and admire it!

All photos Deb Marshall or Charley Freiberg