Dead peppers aren't much fun

Coming up to Christmas, everyone at work was broke so we decided to do our holiday parties low budget. Our organization decided to forego the big holiday gala for the first time ever, so our own departments are doing our own thing. One of my teams decided to do a pre-work breakfast at a local pub (PJ's) that offers a surprisingly good quality selection at rock bottom prices, the other took up my offer of a vegetarian pot luck at my house.

Last week was exam week for my older two kids. The youngest had some big projects. The father of one of her friends was in hospital and we offered to have her come over after school any time. My house at best looks well lived in, but this week it surpassed even my liberal tolerance. I planned to come home early on Thursday so that I would be able to tidy a bit before my team descended upon us.

So what does this have to do with my garden? Well, remember the pepper plants I rescued from the frost and brought inside? I had initially intended to set them up in the basement under grow lights, but Josh got back to work full speed ahead on finishing up our kitchen before Orianne's Bat Mitzvah back in the end of November. He is still working on the parts that were impossible to finish on a short deadline. This precluded turning the workshop space into a greenhouse, partly because of competing needs for space, but also because neither of us had the time to set up the lights. I placed the peppers in containers that I could put water in to create a bit of humidity, and set them up close to the lamp I have in my dining room for houseplants and the windows to keep them going until after the Bat Mitzvah. By that time, most of the plants were starting to look pretty far gone. Leaves falling off, stems turning brown. Being the optimist that I am, I have kept watering and spraying for aphids weekly, but there comes a time when it is clear that there is really nothing left one can do.

When I walked into my dining room and looked around at the laundry on the table, the crumbs on the floor, the sweaters and coats and schoolbags flung on chairs, I noticed that there were only three of the fifteen remaining pepper plants which had the remotest of chances of survival. My first act was to toss twelve potted brown sticks into the mounds of snow outside of my back door.

I did manage to get the rest of the room reasonably tidy, and had a lovely dinner with my colleagues. However, I believe my first attempt at maintaining pepper plants over winter indoors had been an utter failure. The pineapple sage is still hanging in there though.

I bought tomatoes

Yesterday I went grocery shopping and for the first time since July, I bought tomatoes. My chest freezer is filled to bursting with frozen tomato purée but we do sometimes need some raw ones. The last of my harvest went into the freezer on Sunday. The remaining green tomatoes are sitting in a big bucket in the back of the garden. I still have not figured out what to do with them so they remained where I left them when I did my last harvest. I still have some of my in-law's garlic left so I have not had to resort to buying garlic yet.

Some of my indoor peppers turned out to have aphids, though nothing was visible until recently. I made a batch of my soap and baking soda spray and hopefully will get it under control. I threw a few more out into the back yard, and some have lost all their leaves and are looking a bit yellowish brown, but some have leaves sprouting so I have not given up yet.

We have had a few sprinklings of snow, sleet and hard frost but nothing has stayed on the ground. The chrysanthemums have not completely given up but the flowers are not looking too glorious. Everything else has pretty much died.

Flowers in the snow

It started snowing tonight. I have spotted random snowflakes over the past week, but none seemed to have settled on the ground. Just a glimmer in the air that I am not sure was the real thing, but I have just had confirmation from three family members that there was some snow falling down. My pink chrysanthemums which bloomed back in the spring, and then put forth a big new growth last month budded and started blooming again today. Poor timing, chrysanthemums, but a bit exciting to give me something to blog about on this grey, cold November weekend. I still have one last row of carrots under hay which I may harvest tomorrow. Tonight we made Chinese stir fry for dinner and the store bought carrots I nibbled on while prepping tasted like cardboard compared to what I have become accustomed to. We have finished up our garlic, but Josh begged some from his parents so we are still using the good stuff. I have plenty of squirrels and birds visiting my garden to feast on what is left of my sunflowers. I even saw a cedar waxwing munching away. I have never seen one in the city before. I was really excited and ran to get the camera but a squirrel chased it away before I had a chance to get a good shot. Based on the squirrel population that has moved into my back yard, I feel fairly confident that our coyote urine aeration system did indeed work fairly well this summer. 

Because I had to plant the garlic, it forced me to quickly decide where I was going to rotate my crops for next year. We also put in more garlic which means I have to get creative in fitting in the tomatoes and all the rest. I also had a bunch of potatoes this year where I don't think I should be putting tomatoes next year. I am beginning to see the allure of slash and burn agriculture. 

I have uprooted the flowers which I hope to store and replant next year. I ignored the on-line advice about letting the roots dry, and I just chucked them in pots covered in perlite (the package said you can use it for this purpose).  I am back to my Darwinian gardening philosophy of survival of the fittest. If it can survive my ignorant and somewhat lazy approach, it deserves to come back. 

The pineapple sage has lost its flowers and a bunch of leaves, but is hanging on. I used some leaves in my salad dressing last night (I think of it as rent payment for taking up a big patch of my dining room). Some of the peppers lost all their leaves and I put them outside, keeping the ones that were a bit more resilient. Some of them have started growing new leaves, so there is hope.

We hit zero

Last week, according to Environment Canada, the temperature dropped to zero several times. There was no frost on the ground, which for me is a better indicator that the garden season has ended, and I don't know enough about weather to know if no frost means it did not hit zero in my particular micro-environment. Given my usual experience of being slightly later on all my flowers and plants than anyone else in my area including my neighbours, if there would be frost on only one lawn in the city I expect it would be on mine. Not being a pessimist, though, I have not yet thrown in the towel. Instead I threw on some blankets.

 My decision to not pick 1,000 green tomatoes (again) and spend the next month trying to make them into something palatable has been haunting me, for the simple reason that my tomatoes have really finally come into their stride. Despite losing half their leaves and branches to bacterial blight or just late season gradual death, I am still getting new flowers, and the current unripe tomatoes are the biggest and nicest looking of the whole season. The slugs and tiny worms which devour the tomatoes that fall on the ground are still alive and active, evidenced by the tomatoes on the ground with worms and slugs busily getting their last feast of the season, but there is a lot less insect activity going on. I did not have the heart to just give it all up to the mercy of the weather. So following the example of my friends up north who grow a spectacular garden despite a much shorter growing season, Josh and I pulled out our sleeping bags and extra blankets and threw them over the tomato cages. I put some hay bales on the sides as well to keep some of the heat in. My goal was to get a few more of the tomatoes to start to turn orange, then pick them and bring them inside to ripen. I picked a few bucketfuls of tomatoes which were just barely orange, or lighter green, even some which were really green in the hope that they will turn indoors. I know from experience of two years ago that tomatoes that are really green can be brought to ripen in paper bags, but the longer it takes for them to ripen, the less tasty they are so the is no point at all if the end product is lower quality than what I can buy in the store. The temperature was supposed to hover around but not below zero every night last week, and days were cloudy and even rainy. As long as the sun was out, I hoped my tomatoes would take the hint.

I did a bit of research on frost. A light frost is when the temperature drops below zero, a hard frost means it stays down there for four hours or more. So zero is just on the cusp, but a bit more wind and a zero can drop a degree or two and goodbye tomatoes. There are also charts on-line with estimated first and last frost dates. Montreal, according to the Old Farmer's Almanac, should be frost free by May 3, and frost can start as early as October 7. To play it safe, we don't plant much before the third week of May, especially plants like peppers and tomatoes which are tropical and die if the temperature hits below zero. I don't remember a frost as early as October 7, but we usually have our first frost anywhere from mid October to early November.

After two days of putting blankets on my tomato cages, I realized that the temperature was not low enough to really worry, so I gave it up, and put away my well-aired sleeping bags and blankets before it poured rain on them. I have continued to pick likely looking green tomatoes to bring inside to ripen, but whatever is still green by Sunday will be thrown out. Josh proposed posting on Facebook offering anyone who wants a bucket of green tomatoes, but I nixed the idea. Seriously, who wants someone else's green tomatoes. The only people who make things with green tomatoes are serious gardeners who have learned that even green tomatoes may produce surprise volunteers all over next year's garden from compost and hate to throw anything away. Sounds like me. I figure if I got over my aversion to ripping out weeds (which I do with abandon now) and drowning slugs (which I don't do anymore thanks to Slug-be-gone!) I can learn to throw green tomatoes in the garbage. Alternately, I can throw them under my lilac trees and give the last remaining slugs a sour feast, and see what happens.

I have been trying unsuccessfully to keep the peppers going inside. A few seem like they may survive, though most are losing their leaves. At least the peppers are turning red. As I harvest the ripe ones, I am tossing the leafless stems into my compost and reusing the earth to plant my garlic.

I have also inherited Julie's very large pineapple sage plant for safekeeping indoors for the winter. I have had to do a lot of rearranging of my dining room to fit everything in, but so far we still have room to eat, even with guests.

This past weekend, despite a sudden drop in temperature, I finished off the tomatoes and took apart the the cages, put out compost and planted half of the garlic before I ran out of time. Days are getting shorter, and busier. To complicate matters, Josh has temporarily converted the garden shed into a heated, sealed, wood drying chamber as the next installment in building our kitchen (oiling and varnishing the kitchen cabinet drawers outside of the house, and sealed off all my gardening tools before I had the foresight to take them out. I have a rake which was left out, and some bamboo stakes which I used to dig a very thin trench for the garlic cloves. I felt very primitive. Once I got to breaking up the compost and carrying it around to where I was planting the garlic, I decided I needed better tools and borrowed a hoe from my neighbours.

I need to find the time to finish before it gets too cold. Last night we had our first hard frost and whatever is left in the garden now looks like when I leave lettuce at the back of the fridge. I expect to be able to pull out the dahlias, begonias and cannas within days to safeguard their roots (corms? tubers? rhizomes? not sure what is down there).

Waiting for the frost

Last week we started getting some real October weather. In good Montreal tradition, the temperature has fluctuated between close to 20 and as low as 2, sometimes within the same day. Josh just put away his shorts for the year, but the kids are reluctant to clear the summer clothes out, being eternal optimists. I gave up on my light jacket and started wearing my winter coat this weekend.

The garden has been in a state of some confusion. Not only did my lamiums start to bloom again, but my stella d'oro lilies and my gerbera daisies made a late fall comeback. The pink chrysanthemums I planted back in the spring have spread and look ready to bloom, if a frost doesn't kill them first.

The tomatoes are going full swing, though a lot of the leaves and branches on the plants are dying. I am not sure if it is because of the bacterial problems, or if the leaves yellow and die in the fall regardless. The spraying with hydrogen peroxide did a good job on controlling the bacteria in the tomatoes. I still have a few with black areas on them, sometimes the bottom half of the tomato, and sometimes just a bit at the bottom of the centre where the seeds are, but most of the tomatoes ripening now are big and healthy. Over the past two weeks, I have starting picking the orange tomatoes as well as the red ones so that in case the weather dips below zero overnight, I won't lose any of the tomatoes which are starting to ripen. I am not planning to try to save and use every green tomato this year. I still have a lot of the chow chow relish we made last year, which really was the most successful use of the unripe tomatoes. I found the green tomato sauces and soups to be too acidic to enjoy the quantities we made. The orange tomatoes are ripening very quickly when I bring them indoors. I also noticed that when the weather is hot, only the red tomatoes come easily off the stem when picked, but as the weather gets cold, even the unripe orange ones come off with no effort.



I brought in the first three pepper plants about a month ago, and it gave me a chance to compare how they do inside versus outside. The indoor peppers ripened to red, but the leaves turned yellow and fell off. The outdoor peppers have held out well, but almost all of the peppers stayed green. Yesterday I brought them all in. I did a bit of research on the web, and it seems that peppers like it hot and steamy, 27 degrees celcius high humidity, and lots of light, but not to much water. I think I seriously over-watered the first few I brought inside. I am not sure what to do with the rest of them. Right now my options are the basement under a florescent full spectrum bulb where it is cool and only moderately humid, or in front of my dining room windows with humidity increasing when we make soup or pasta. I am not pleased with increasing heat and humidity in the basement. I hope to keep the plants going long enough for the peppers to turn red, maybe even for the ones still flowering to produce fruit, and with some luck I will keep a few through the winter.

I harvested most of my carrots and using them and the rest of the potatoes, with some other vegetables lying around the fridge, Josh made a wonderful soup. I left one last row of carrots, hoping they will still grow. I plan to cover some up with hay bales before the frost and harvest them gradually into the late fall like my mother-in-law does, just to see how that works. I managed to get some decent sized carrots, but many were small because I planted too many too close together and did not thin them out. Ultimately, I ended up doing the equivalent of thinning at harvest time, keeping the bigger carrots and composting, or even replanting the small, undeveloped ones.

I am really pleased that this late in the season I still have flowers going. All my annuals (petunias, nasturtiums, marigolds, cosmos, begonias, chrysanthemums, sunflowers, pansies, dahlias) are still going to a greater or lesser degree. I looked online to see how and when I should be digging up the roots for the dahlias, begonias and cannas, and how to prepare and store. I am supposed to wait until the leaves turn yellow on the begonias, but they are not ready to give up the ghost yet.  Makes it a bit hard to plan my gardening schedule. Unlike spring where I can work by the calendar, now I have to follow the weather and the plants.


The strawberries have made a comeback, at least the alpine ones, which like cool weather, though they are not as prolific as they are in midsummer. Strangely, my raspberries are in full swing and I am picking an average of ten berries daily off the four or five active canes, and they show no signs of slowing down.

Another last fall task is planting garlic. We have been happily eating up our harvest from this summer, and Josh was reluctant to already give up great taste for the rest of the year in order to have cloves to plant for this year, so he begged more garlic from his parents who were kind enough to share some more. I hope to plant them soon, as it is cold enough, but I want to put them in the areas where the tomatoes are still going strong. In order to keep up my intention to rotate crops, I need to finish one thing before I can plant for next year.

While picking tomatoes, I found a very slow moving mantis walking across an open patch of hay where the potatoes had been. It looked injured but I could not see where. I picked it up and moved it onto the nearest tomato cage so that it would not be eaten by a bird. I managed to get some great photos before she pulled herself into the leaves. Josh says it was a female who had recently laid her eggs, and that they use all their energy up in the process, then stop eating and die before the winter.

Julie's garden

I promised to do an late season update on my friend Julie's garden. She has two gardening areas, one being her large balcony, and the other a very small yet fertile plot of land across an alley behind the duplex where she lives.

I gave Julie some beans which came from my neighbours originally, and some tomato seedlings too. She tried an upside down hanging tomato plant and a flower garden in an upright wooden pallet, as well as pots and balcony boxes with flowers and herbs.

Her beans did far better than mine did, and unlike me, she let them mature fully. I ate mine when they were underdeveloped as though they were string beans rather than the type of bean that you discard the hull and boil in soups. I just love the taste of whole fresh beans. I also am the only avid bean eater in the house so I just snack on them as I garden.  Julie grew her beans along the fence of the property backing onto her garden plot, and the beans grew along the fence and bolted right up a telephone pole.

Julie sent me some photos of her garden which I asked permission to share on the blog.

Her pineapple sage had a lot of sun, and grew from a small plant to three feet tall. When Jasmyn gave me some from her garden up north a couple of years ago, she told me that they are very tolerant of shade. In fact they were the only flowering plant to have survived in my "black hole of death," the area on the left side of my front stairs which was in full shade before Josh trimmed a few choice branches off one of the trees in the front yard.  Now that I see what they look like when they get sun, I know better than to put them in a dark area.

Julie does not have a sunny spot inside to keep it overwinter, so she offered for me to take it in. We both did some research and found that you can take cuttings to make new plants in the spring, so we can share next year if I don't kill it over the winter. At least I now know what it is called, and where Julie bought it in Montreal so we can always start new ones next year. I am not super confident in keeping it going, I seem to have much better success with plants outside than inside.

In the meantime, we have started getting colder temperatures but so far no frost. The few pepper plants I brought inside look droopy and are losing leaves, and the peppers are still not turning red. I have left most of them outside and only will move more of them in once there is a frost warning. I still need to make room to house them with sufficient lighting.

Speaking of weathering the cold, I am waiting for signs of my dahlias, begonias and canas dying so I can uproot them and store the roots indoors. I am going to try to keep some of my annuals intact for another year.

I have also been selectively reseeding my dark purple cosmos in some of the sunnier patches in the front where I put down fresh earth. I am hoping for some bigger, earlier and more impressive growth next year.

Julie's pallet garden is still going well and makes an interesting decoration and conversation piece on her balcony. The flowers that need less water did better nearer the top. I think she rearranged them a bit to take advantage of the different micro-climates produced by the slope where the top dried quickly and the bottom section retained water better. Julie is already coming up with ideas for next year.

Fall fireworks

The past two weeks we have had glorious weather. Usually in Montreal, by mid August we are already starting to wear sweaters and the warm, sunny days are becoming fewer and farther between. This year we had a warm August followed by some cold weather for a week or so in September, then a long, dry, sunny spell of days in the 20's which have stretched right into October.
We still have not put away the shorts and t-shirts, although evenings and nights the temperatures are dropping between 10 and even 20 degrees.

I have not been watering the garden much, it seems that the dew has been heavy maybe because of the large fluctuation of the temperature. The tomatoes have been loving this weather and continue to produce and ripen at a steady pace.





The peppers are slow to turn red, but as they are all in pots, I plan to move as many of them inside as will fit in my house. I harvested the rest of the potatoes, which were exquisite. I am gradually pulling out the carrots but many are still small, probably because I planted them much too close together.

I did some work on improving patches of the flower beds which had grown over with grass by digging them up, putting in new earth and manure, and covered them with hay to prevent late season weeds from infiltrating.
I planted all the bulbs which I ordered from Vesey's catalogue, a few varieties of tulips, hyacinths, allium and anemones. I also moved one clump of Siberian Irises which had been inundated by my daylilies in their quest to conquer the world.



The raspberries are in full production mode, and one of the mantises and a number of spiders have set up hunting grounds around the sweet ripe fruit, so that picking raspberries has become that much more interesting. I have yet to map out next year's vegetable garden landscape, but that will come this month too.






























I took a couple of days to go up north and borrow my parent's house in Morin Heights, in the Laurentians, as they were away on a cruise in Europe. The changing of the leaves takes place earlier there than in Montreal because of the higher altitude and latitude.


"Peak week" for leaves, as my mom calls it, is when the colours are at their height. I have not been up north in the fall for many years, because it is always a very busy time for kids, and with Jewish holidays usually falling right at that time, it is hard for me to get away from the city.







This year I found a way to take two days, and was thrilled to land in the height of the leaves. Every year the colours are a bit different, due to temperature and humidity variations I suppose, but every few years there is one where the most intense oranges, pinks and reds are in evidence, and this was the one. Also, the fact that it was both sunny and warm enabled me to get the maximum effect of the colour.







I took my parent's canoe out of winter storage (what were they thinking? the lake was not frozen yet!) and spent a few hours with the best view of the fall leaves, duplicated by the reflection on the water. I also went hiking. My photos are all from the shoreline or in the woods because I once ruined my favorite camera in an unexpected canoeing accident (that's a long story), and do not ever plan to take photos from a canoe again.


The lake was full of birds: two loons in winter plumage (I had never seen that before), eight common mergansers, two female mallard ducks right up close to the shore, and a great blue heron.

Summer not quite done apparently

Usually summer is well over by late August, but this year we have been alternating hot and cold right up to late September. I am watching for frost warnings and then suddenly we have several days where we are back in shorts and tank tops.

I have brought in a few hot pepper plants in case I miss a forecast for a sudden turn in the weather. They are still flowering and most have peppers which are still green. The nasturtiums are still going strong, and some new ones have popped up! The sedems are doing fine, but we did not have much luck with the wild variety, the orpine, this year due to aphids and my overkill attempts to rid them with too much soap. They are still alive, though, so I hope we will have better luck next year.

The past few weeks have marked the beginning of the Jewish year and the fall holidays. Though usually both a time of great joy and serious introspection, this year has been particularly difficult for our family as we had a very sudden and shocking death during the Jewish new year of my husband's older brother. A close friend of ours is seriously ill, in hospital, as well. Whatever gardening has happened in the weeks since has been purely maintenance.
We had a shiva at our house, and the day it ended we started the Jewish harvest holiday of Succoth, where we eat our meals in our own version of a harvest hut.

Although we were not feeling very festive, we had some friends and close family join us, and the garden provided a welcome talking point other than sorrow and tragedy.

We are still seeing some mantises. Orianne found one on the fence and called us to look. I caught a glimpse just before it flew up to the branches which make up the porous roof of our succah. I am sure that with the lights and candles burning late into the evening there was a constant supply of bugs. We could not find him up there again, though. 

Despite his best efforts, we actually had mosquitoes nibbling us in our succah, unheard of in Montreal where we usually are wary of possible snow. Succoth fell early this year, and summer stretched out just a bit longer to allow us a surprisingly pleasant week of outdoor eating for this late in the season.

We have some very large spiders around the house and garden. Below is a trap door spider who built a fantastic construction on a milkweed plant. At least it is housing some life, I did not see a single monarch butterfly all summer despite my allowing the proliferation of milkweed on the hidden side of the house, in hope to attract some. In fact, I saw very few butterflies other than cabbage moths. The sunflowers attracted some interesting birds, among them goldfinches, and the bee balm is still pulling in bees even with the flowers mostly dried out.

I did a mini-harvest of carrots, and they were good though not large. I left most in the ground hoping the last few weeks of decent weather will increase the harvest. I served a potato kugel made from our potatoes and garlic, and flavoured everthing we served with our herbs. We had a lot of mint tea, as the mint is still going strong, and the raspberries and strawberries are doing well now that the weather is a bit cooler.

Josh took a bit of time before the holidays to continue working on arboursculpting the crabapple trees into an archway. They seem to be surviving the bending and reshaping.

I had a few late season surprises. My gerbera daisy has decided to bloom again, as did one of the Cannas, and a few Gentians too. I had given up hope on all of them, and picked up a few cheap but glorious chrysanthemums from the grocery store to make things look less dead and dreary. Iulia, my neighbour, came home from work a couple of weeks ago with a big bag full of hostas of the same variety which she already has. After a few days contemplating the issue of where to put them, she decided to give them to me. I did not like hostas when I started gardening, but they are quite forgiving of my lack of sun and crappy soil, and provided a solution to the empty patch on the right side of the garden in front, covering up the ugly yellow pipe and peeling paint on the footing of the house.

I think it might work.

Yesterday, my package of bulbs arrived from Vesey's which I had ordered together with Iulia to plant in the fall. We got together last night and divvied up the loot. Now I have to figure out where I am going to put drumstick alliums, hyacinths, tulips and whatever else I bought. I had a $50 discount so we had a lot of fun ordering last July. The package came with a small guidebook for planting and caring for bulbs, and dealing with common problems. And of course, yet another catalogue (sigh). We both decided to hide it for now and not spend any more money.

From now on, I pick tomatoes, carrots, hot peppers, the last of the potatoes, berries and beans, until the frost hits.  I also need to plan out the design for next year and plant garlic and my new bulbs.