Fall again

We had heavy rain and winds on Tuesday, the second day of Rosh Hashana, which ushered in a change in the weather. It is suddenly colder, especially at night, although it is heating up mid-day. The sun is setting earlier. I was caught by sudden sunset while picking tomatoes and couldn't see anything and had to stop mid-bush. Leaves are late in turning because it was so hot early in September, but now there are patches of yellow starting, and the ash tree next door is dropping branches all over my yard and garden. I suppose that is not quite a fall thing but the wind is wreaking havoc on its crown.

Gentian finally in bloom!

I made a beautiful salad for our Rosh Hashana dinner with my last stunted lettuces, nasturtium leaves, cherry tomatoes, wood sorrel and green onions from the garden mixed with red curly and romaine lettuce and cukes from the grocery store and garnished with four different coloured nasturtium flowers. It was gorgeous. I am sorry I did not take a picture.

Iulia and her family were away and left me in charge of her garden in their absence. I was delighted that we had a good rainfall and that there is rain predicted over the next week. I am pleased that I have not had to find time to water both gardens, and their lawn. Ovidiu would never forgive me if I let his emerald green perfect lawn die. Iulia asked me to plant a bucket of lilies given her by a colleague before she left. She started a new garden patch around one of the trees in the front lawn and created a mound of earth so it would slope out from the tree, but without any ground cover to anchor the earth it was eroding. She decided to anchor the rim of the hill with the orange day lilies (Canadian lilies). She has resisted the orange lilies to date, being too plain and invasive. I have offered to share mine (so has everyone she knows who has any, they spread like nuts). She had no time before her trip, so I did the honours. I did not have time before the weekend, and the night before we had a big rainstorm so when I went to plant them they were immersed in water, well soaked. Good thing I planted them before they rotted.

I have had a lot of tomatoes to pick. Iulia has only large beefsteak tomatoes, so they are large but take time to ripen and there are only one or two per plant at a time. They are stakes to poles and carefully pruned. This may lead to fewer but larger tomatoes. Picking hers is faster and easier. Despite her complaints that her mother planted too many too close together, I have an easy time getting around and through. My tomatoes are a veritable jungle, and I need to approach each row from different angles, getting down low and looking up and from all sides or I miss tomatoes. There are buckets of tomatoes everywhere. I am starting to pick them before they are fully ripe just in case it gets too cold one night and we lose them. I also have less time so I am not getting out every day. I have been late for work three times in the past couple of weeks because I just needed ten more minutes to get the last patch of tomatoes.

I have a spectacular huge garden spider who makes amazing webs which I keep messing up trying to get the tomatoes in the back of the patch. I scared it this week so badly it hid in a fetal position under a leaf for a few hours. I know because I kept checking if it had rebuilt the web and if I could get a photo. No such luck. I think it is one of the ones which hatched out off of one of my basil pots back in late May.

I have basil going to seed again, the plants are half the size they were for the first two harvests but still sizable enough for another small batch of pesto. That is part of this week's plans. I have been going to the Sears outlet store near my house weekly to see if any chest freezers have come into stock. We have taken over a few more freezers (Naomi, Alan and JT) and are still producing several litres of tomato pulp weekly. Josh is making more hot sauce from the hot peppers. They are all producing lovely, bright coloured peppers in various shapes and sizes. The hot sauce it turning out very nicely. The groundfall green tomatoes are going into that pot.

I was at Walmart last weekend and as I walked in the door there were chrysanthemums on sale. I impulsively bought a deep red coloured plant and planted it right in front of my house. Iulia convinced me last year that they are perennials but I don't see any of the ones we planted last year. I figure for $6 I would splurge on a bit of fall colour. My flower garden is looking a bit sparse. The lamium is blooming yet again, and there are a few sunflowers left. The single gentian I transplanted from Alex's place has finally blossomed. I hope it spreads, it is really pretty. The nasturtiums are spreading and blooming and stunning. I hope they reseed themselves. I dropped some black-eyed susan heads in a different patch of the garden to see if they will colonize. Otherwise, I will do some splitting and transplanting in the spring. I am not cruising the neighbourhood snitching seeds this year. I am feeling like my garden is coming into its own. I can't wait to see what it will look like next spring!

Gardens of memory: a gardener's Shana Tova

Tomorrow night marks the beginning of the Jewish year, and in our tradition the new year is a solemn and serious time, a time for remembering, reflecting, and starting afresh on a clean slate to be a better person. It is a time of prayer and family, of feasting and fasting. The fall holiday cycle begins with the new year, followed by the day of Atonement for sins. The second part of the cycle is the harvest festival of Succoth and finally Simchat Torah, the Festival of rejoicing with the Torah in which we celebrate the completion of the reading of the Torah,and begin anew. Our new year is honoured on a personal and interpersonal level first, then a celebration of the abundant gifts of G-d from the land on the level of the environment, and finally a community celebration of our unique heritage and covenant with the Almighty in the form of our Torah, our law. 

Within the past weeks, members of our family have experienced the loss of a close family member and a close friend. Grief has coloured our start to this new year. I dedicate this blog to our family in this time of remembrance.

In life we are all gardeners. We come into the world, we have our first social experiences outside our family in nurseries and kindergardens where the adults in our life plant the seeds of our future selves. Children grow. They learn. The come to love the earth, feel compassion and fascination for its creatures. Even in today's modern urbanized world, children still celebrate the earth and its bounty. They plant plants in science class, rescue injured birds, watch in amazement as a butterfly leaves its cocoon. They grow and they learn to love and appreciate all that grows around them. We form relationships, with family members, with friends. We never cease to meet and engage and grow to love new people in our lives. We nurture these relationships, we feed them with patience, water them with emotions, weave our roots and branches together to become stronger, intertwined.

My garden teaches me about life. I have learned to love the sun for the sweetness it gives, but understand the need to temper its effects or it burns and dries. One beetle, the lady bug, is a trusted friend who devours the aphids. Another is the subtle and swift cucumber beetle who has decimated part of my harvest this year. I miss the sweet crispness of the fresh picked cucumber, which is like nothing you can buy. I have learned to love the rain with an intensity I never felt before. I understand the prayers for rain, the prayers for dew which we recite year round. As much as I can water with a hose, it never nourishes the way the rain does. After a unusually long, hot and dry summer, I celebrate every rain fall. I watch the skies open up and run to my door or window to watch and offer prayers of thanksgiving. Rain is lifegiving. Rain is nourishing, cleansing, bringing of joy. I have learned the balance of the ecosystem in my tiny world of my backyard. It is a place of surprises, where things grow unexpectedly, some of which are delicious, or beautiful, or invasive. It is a place where, when their needs are understood and met, living things grow strong and bear fruit. It is a place of cycles where living things sprout, grow, bear fruit, wither and ultimately die. There are times when all is desolate, until the cycle begins anew in the spring.

A family is like a garden, where each person's life is entwined with others. Each member is different and can complement and support the others around him or her. But like a garden, there is a season for everyone. We are born, we grow, we build our own family and community, and ultimately we fade and die. Some leave behind children, even grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Most leave behind friends, people who we have touched, who we have nurtured and shared with and loved. Everyone leaves behind memories.

This coming year, I am planting a garden of memory. I remember those who were lost, who have left this world. I will taste the sweetness of the memories of the beautiful times we shared and savour them. Shana tova, a good new year, to all of you, my friends, family and readers.

Counting our blessings

It has been a busy couple of weeks. The kids are back at school, and this year they are at three different schools with different schedules. I am back to teaching as well, doing a one-month intensive make up for most of a semester lost to a student strike. The Jewish holidays start in one week's time. I am also working full time at my rather challenging day job. On top of all that, it is harvest time. This week we will have one last, smaller, basil harvest. The beans and the tomatoes are still going full tilt, and the hot peppers are gradually ripening. Josh is making a jar of hot sauce once per week. I picked the potatoes, because the plants had died, but there were four marble-sized minis and one medium one. I tossed it in my soup last week with the two onions from the garden, some beans, tomatoes, garlic and some stuff from the grocery store to round it out (yams, lentils, celery and spices). I have been looking to buy a chest freezer, but in the meantime we have been using space at Naomi's, Lisa's, Alan's and have Julie and my parents on standby. Josh is donating half of our pesto and a bunch of frozen tomato puree to our synagogue for a future pasta night fundraiser dinner. The cantor has been helping him out making sure all is done kosher, even using the synagogue kitchen to make the basil. It has been very warm up until today, so the garden has not been feeling autumn yet. This weekend the weather shifted, and we had a big rainstorm bringing in some colder, windier weather. There were lots of fallen branches yesterday and hydro trucks everywhere repairing downed lines.

Our sunflowers turned out to be a wide variety of different cultivars, with only one being tall. Ironically, I had thought that was a small one and planted it in one of the cinder blocks in the back. It did well, and the squirrels did not get it despite the fact I ran out of fox piss. We never got around to reordering. None of the sunflowers had large seeds, though. Just the tiny black ones that you find in pet food, too small to get much out of, so I am not fussing with harvesting and roasting them. Next year I may try to plant the giant grey stripe variety again, and see how they do in the cinder blocks.

 

My bergamot are doing great in the back yard, I am so glad I moved them. The nasturtiums are amazing, huge and bursting with flowers. I moved the tiny mystery flower, which is still putting up a new blossom every week or so, to the side of the house so it is not lost in the tomatoes.

Just a note on tomatoes. We have had a unique opportunity to compare how different varieties managed under pretty much the same conditions. It was a hot and dry summer, but I did some watering especially in July when it was really hot with no rain for days on end (weeks even). The watering was at root level or low down, we had soaker hoses covering most of the tomatoes, the odd scattered weed tomatoes I hand watered rather than using the sprinkler.

 

The San Marzanos which Josh bought as plants from a garden centre were the second largest seedlings at planting time, and produced huge tomatoes, but did not have the clusters that the smaller plants produced. They had maybe three or four growing together maximum. The ones we planted from seed produced the most tomatoes, although the average size of each tomato was half to two-thirds of the size of the purchased one. The best producer was the one which Nathalie gave us, which gave us up to ten cherry-sized tomatoes daily from a single plant. It was the biggest when we planted it. I have been researching on-line and I believe that they are called black cherry tomatoes. The chocolate tomatoes were difficult to handle. They went from green-tinged to overripe overnight and they were big, soft and well attached to the vine even when fully ripe. They also melted if you did not eat them rapidly. Maybe they are supposed to be picked while still greenish? The beefsteak tomatoes from Iulia produced a small number of huge tomatoes, some of which fell apart while still on the plant, and a few were half-eaten by something even while green (which did not happen to the other tomatoes). The yellow ones were lovely, easy, prolific and tasty. They were bigger than cherry tomatoes and smaller than plums. I have no idea how they ended up in the garden, or what they are called. I will be sure to save some seeds for next year.