Garden Therapy and Harvest festivals

It is late October. I had expected to be wrapping up my garden by now, pulling up the dead remnants of the plants, raking out last year's compost and bedding it all down in a layer of hay. Surprisingly, we are not there yet.

My tomatoes are still blooming. So are my squashes. Both are full of green fruits and I am still harvesting. I peeked under the potatoes and sweet potatoes which I planted far too late to expect much and got a bowlful of baby potatoes. The peppers are covered in fruit, with some reddening or turning yellow daily. The four plants that are in pots have been moved under a grow light in my basement, and are ripening much faster. My nasturtiums finally started to bloom two days ago! My morning glories are still flowering. The new patch of lamium I planted in July is starting to flower. The strange mint hybrid with the red trumpet flowers have decided to bloom again too. For those of my readers who are not in Montreal, it has been cold and rainy all week. We are wearing winter coats, but we still have not had a frost so my garden is convinced that there is still hope. I am picking every tomato with the slightest hint of a blush because I am sure nothing will vine ripen before the frost hits. The tomatoes are ripening nicely inside. I am bringing in the green ones that fall down. We have been discussing pickled green tomatoes, green tomato chutney, fried green tomatoes, but Josh decided to throw them in with the assortment of ripe peppers to make the hottest litre of hot pepper sauce I have ever tasted. My mouth felt like the finale in a fireworks show, with each in the series of explosions having a different size and colour.

Given that this was not the weekend of garden wrap up, I will be continuing my blog for a bit longer this season. I have not blogged for a while because I have been in the midst of Jewish holidays. For the past four weeks, I have been trying to balance harvesting with my day job, the kids back at school, violin lessons, gymnastics, visiting open houses for both high school and CEGEP (college), and Jewish holidays. I even succeeded in recruiting my children to help harvest tomatoes ten minutes before lighting the candles for Succoth, the Jewish harvest festival. I have been trying to avoid all gardening activities on the Holy days, leading to mad scrambles to get it all done.

For Succoth, it is the custom to build a temporary shed (a succah or tabarnacle in archaic English) outdoors with branches on top to allow you to see the stars. It is a reminder of the harvest huts of the ancient world, and the shelters in which we slept during the forty years we wandered from Egypt through the desert. We eat in the succah, and in nicer climates than Montreal, people sleep in the succah too. The weather was cooperative and allowed us to entertain two dozen friends and family members in our succah last week. To be in our hut surrounded by our garden, eating our own produce was really special and meaningful.

Among our guests were my in-laws, who brought a basket of goodies from their garden. They had great success with rapini, and brought us a huge mass of giant green leaves. Josh and I decided we needed to do a lot more research on why ours failed utterly, as we enjoyed a wonderful dinner of pasta and fresh rapini. They also brought us garlic, onions, carrots, turnips, cabbage and spaghetti squash (double the size of ours). They give me a taste of what is yet to come from my own backyard down the road.

As I was nearing the end of the holiday cycle, my garden was getting somewhat neglected. Three of my tomato plants did not fit in our well organized cage system, and although we had staked them with bamboo poles early in the summer, we did not maintain them and by last week, the branches with fruit were sprawling on the ground in a buffet for the last remaining resilient slugs. Also, many of the branches of the other sixteen plants, particularly those with no tomatoes on them, were drying up and dying. With the rain, the dead leaves were sticking to the green tomatoes and threatening to rot them. So I decided to tie up the drooping branches and snip the dead ones, tidy things up a bit. The one day this week there was sun, I left my children to their own devices and took to the garden with a scissors and some string. I knew that my children would avoid me like the plague knowing that if they even showed their faces in the back yard, they risked being co-opted to help in the task. I had the quietest couple of hours you could imagine. At some point, my friend Mike dropped by. He is currently underemployed and none too happy about it, and found me to be a very receptive if somewhat invisible ear to his troubles. He said that he could locate my position more from the rustling of the bushes than my occasional comments. I was a totally captive audience. I realized that garden therapy works in many ways. This week, I gardened while he got therapy.

Upon finishing my almost obsessive trimming of the tomato jungle, I can now see all the green tomatoes from my window in the house. I no longer need to dive through branches and lift sections to find hidden treasures. There are still hundreds more which I hope will start to ripen before the temperature hits freezing later this week (according to environment Canada weather). Especially as this late season crop are big, hearty tomatoes with few slugs to bother them. We are still pureeing twice a week and freezing the puree for our first annual Italian style big tomato sauce cook-off.