Shana tova u'metuka: welcoming the new year with garden delights and butterflies

This week we celebrated the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashana. We have had great weather, a nice mix of rain and hot sunny days. The leaves have barely begun to change colours. Although by climate change standards, this is alarming weather for mid September in Montreal, it is good news for gardeners who suffered from a long, cold, wet spring and a late start for tomatoes. The flowers are still going strong. This summer, due to weather conditions and a certain degree of coincidence in where I moved things around last year, I have had different sections of the garden in full bloom at various times during the summer. It is like there is a spotlight that moves around to different areas at different times. Unlike past summers, there were no long stretches where nothing was flowering, so I managed to achieve the impression that I had actually planned things out.






I have garnered the attention of some people in the neighbourhood. I think the fact that I had a very extended teacher's vacation this year resulted in me spending more time visible in the garden, and passersby would stop to talk. A gentleman who lives across the street, whom I had never met before, came over to tell me that his kitchen window looks out over the garden and he has enjoyed watching the display. I am also starting to get unsolicited advice, such as the importance of controlling the spread of my cosmos, which up to this year has not even been an issue.

I had an unexpected bloom this fall. I have discovered that coleus have very pretty flowers.
I planted those this year for the first time.

Josh chatted with the neighbours in the back, and confirmed that the prickly bushes in the corner of the lane are in fact raspberries, so I am no longer going around the fence to pick them. They were pleased to have our escapees turn up. We also discussed the massive squash plant. The neighbours explained that they had dumped some decorative squashes in that corner, and expect that something sprouted. I am not sure if the branch in our yard under the apple tree is part of this collection, or something that came from our own compost bin, which is right along the fence on the other side of the squash plant. We are waiting to see what grows. The flowers were huge, but a few have fallen off leaving just a stem. I am hoping there is enough time for fruit to grow before the frost. I checked online, and unless the squashes are decorative (as opposed to edible), we can eat them as though they are zucchini when they are immature, so I am willing to try.

In the flower garden, the gentians are blooming. I always forget they are there, and they surprise me every year. The sunflowers are huge and abundant. I have been picking bouquets and giving them to people, nibbling on small but tasty sunflowers, and adorning my holiday table with a multi-coloured selection. I have a certain amount of theft by squirrels, which I can certainly spare. Our bird Koko is not very interested in the seeds, but has been a real hog for the raspberries which are beyond abundant this year. I have been making pies, tarts and crumbles with enough left to give a care package to anyone who drops by, and keep Koko happy.

We have been inundated with bees and a wide variety of other pollinating insects. The bee balm, well past the stage of looking pretty, continues to do its job attracting bees. The sunflowers are another magnet for bees, as are the raspberries (along with a host of mosquitoes and other things that attack me every day when I harvest). The garden spiders have set up camp in the raspberries and in the beans, and are looking quite large this year. I caught a picture of a bee in the mint patch, and wonder what mint honey tastes like. I am pretty sure it was a honey bee. I am pleased to see so many of them alive and well.

On the morning before Rosh Hashana, it was raining but I was out harvesting the days crop of raspberries so we could make a raspberry apple crumble for dessert. I noticed that there were a lot of bees, as well as a dragonfly, sheltering from the rain by clinging to a sunflower. The bees were not moving around, just sitting out the rain. There are better shelters in my garden, but the sunflowers seemed to be a location of choice.


Another surprise has been a few sightings of monarch butterflies. My last blog I posted a picture but the next day, late in the afternoon, I saw two monarchs. This time I got my camera and they both cooperated to allow me to take some better shots. They were not close enough together for a double shot. They really like Iulia's zinias, which I am pleased that she planted just across the fence from our garden, so I could get a great view. They both checked out the sunflowers, but decided they preferred the zinias. On Rosh Hashana, walking back from synagogue, I saw another monarch, this time it was one with a tag on it from the botanical gardens. I am glad to have seen a few, they have become so rare and elusive.

A last bit about flowers before I get into the tastier stuff, I had some nice variety among my morning glories in the past few weeks. A few years back, I started a patch of purple ones, then added seeds that I pinched off a number of plants growing on fences along the alleyways of our neighbourhood. Technically, the seeds were not in anyone's yard, and would likely fall on pavement and never grow, so I see it as liberating them. I picked various shades of pink. I occasionally had one or two pop up that were not in the dominant purple colour, until this year, when after about a month of exclusive purple seeds, I got a late blooming variety of pinks, and even some blues.

I can't remember if I threw in some new seeds in the spring, or if these are hybrids of some of the mixed ones from years past. Whichever the case, they are really quite lovely.



Like most Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashana involves eating. There is a great deal of praying too, as well as socializing with friends and family. This year, more than we ever have, we were able to feature the garden in our holiday meals. A few days before the new year, I dug up three quarters of our carrots. They were big, and tasty too. I also harvested a lot of our potatoes.

 I am not sure what proportion, because I did not really dig, just stuck my hands beneath the hay along the surface and took what was easy to get. There might be a lot more below the surface, but I am saving those for Succoth, the next holiday which involves feasting (and celebrates the harvest, appropriately!).

The potatoes are doing really well. I have never grown from the big, extra large potatoes before (I don't usually buy those, and I plant whatever potatoes are sprouting in my potato bin), but I will make sure to repeat the experiment. They get big and are prolific, giving great yield for the space they take up. The ones in the bathtub died off fastest, and did not produce a lot or very large ones, so I won't put them there again. We picked rosemary, sage and thyme to season them, along with our garlic of course, and served them cut and roasted. The carrots were served as a baked lemon carrot tzimmis. I picked a lot of mint, and made fresh mint lemonade, which has become a family favourite for parties and holidays.

I had stopped picking beans because after six weeks eating them two meals a day, we needed a break. I was leaving them to go to seed, both for replanting and for trying them in soups, which we haven't done in the past. The kids and Josh don't like cooked carrots very much, so I decided that we would have beans as an alternate dish. I picked the smaller beans. Despite a resurgence in slugs, the purple beans were still producing a few late season beans. The pole beans are in fantastic shape and going strong. I think I am leaving the rest for seed at this point, but I snack on them raw as I am doing my harvesting every day.

The lettuce I planted in the spring has pretty much died off, as well as the few I transplanted from the Vanier gardens where they were getting eaten by a groundhog. The seeds I planted a few weeks ago have not come up. The lettuce the the chard which I did not plant are doing fantastic, and I am still eating it. The cucumbers are slowing down. I left a few to go to seed, in the hope that I will have better luck next year. Elena, my neighbour's mother, says that they do better if you do not transplant them (meaning the ones you plant come up and you don't have to go to the store to buy seedlings late in the game...). This was my lunch before Rosh Hashana, with cucumbers, beans and lettuce from the garden, and some of Chloe's fantastic beets.

The tomatoes are slowly ripening. An entire section have green tomatoes, but I am getting some. The san marzanos are small, so I have a lot more volume from the heritage chocolate tomatoes and the beefsteak tomatoes. This means the puree I am producing is more watery than usual. Chloe gave us a few of her san marzanos, which were three times the size of ours. The difference of full sun is incredible (and a few more years of hay gardening). Because we were serving salmon as the main course, and neither of our daughters eat fish, Josh cooked up some pasta and a fresh sauce as an alternative. We have not needed to do much more cooking the rest of the week, and were able to give some care packages out as well.

Over the garden fence (or where things are starting to escape!)

This has been a very unusual fall. Although technically fall starts September 21, in Montreal, it usually starts by mid-August, with nights getting colder and leaves starting to turn colours. Not this year. It is past Labour Day and the past month it has rained once. One big thunderstorm two nights ago, which did nothing to cut the heat and humidity. (Correction, midway through writing this blog it has started to rain. Make that twice). On Labour day weekend, it snowed in Calgary and was 4 degrees in Edmonton, but Montreal was 35 with high humidity.

We have had heavy dew in the mornings, so I have not needed to go crazy watering the garden, but some of the annuals are pretty much dried out and finished.  Although I am not a big fan of hot, humid weather, and usually can't wait for the cool fall days, with the summer we had, I am grateful for a bit of "overtime" to catch up on tomatoes. We had no ripe tomatoes at all until the third week of August, and more than half of my plants have yet to produce a ripe tomato. This is largely because my original planted tomatoes were destroyed by flea beetles early in the summer, and most of what is growing are volunteers, and a few plants I got from Iulia.

Interestingly, the plants which I thought were chocolate cherries, which turned out to be the wrinkly heritage tomatoes from Alex, have been very resistant to all the other tomato pests that affected the San Marzanos. Some of them were chocolate, but a lot of them were the more familiar orange-red of store bought tomatoes. It seems they had been hybridizing. Two of the volunteer plants that I moved into the cages ended up being the chocolate cherries, which are bigger than they were in the past. Again, I am not sure if that is because of the weather conditions, or if they too have hybridized. 

The raspberries had a period of a couple of weeks in August when they slowed down, but are in bigger production now than they were back in July. I have been picking around a cup a day, and have made raspberry pies the last two Fridays. The first one was expanded with some apple, but last week was pure homegrown raspberry, and we are looking good for this weekend too, even with everyone snacking on them. 

I went around the other side of our back fence last week, because I wanted to check the beans that had grown around the back. The back of our property has a narrow, grassed over lane which belongs to Hydro Quebec as an access point for making repairs to electric lines. Its a no-man's land, which our neighbour behind the back fence uses to park his truck and his RV. I had offered them any produce that migrates over to their side of the fence, but so far they have not taken us up on the offer. This year, we had a lot of cross-the-fence migration going on. There is a new raspberry patch starting in the corner behind the lilacs. They are just ripening now, so they are definitely a first year growth. The sunflowers have grown tall enough that from the back of the fence, you have a sea of bobbing yellow heads visible from the street. One surprise this week was a massive squash plant which had originated in my compost bin (possibly pumpkin, or spaghetti squash) which has a branch growing under my apple tree, and some long, blooming strands running through the lilac canes coming up where we cut down the big patch earlier this summer. Given how late it is, I am not sure that whatever is growing there will be able to fruit, but we may be able to get baby squashes before the first frost. According to the internet, you can eat immature squash as if it is zucchini, skin and all. You can also eat the flowers, lots of recipes on-line. Good to know!

I had hoped to harvest my seven apples for Rosh Hashana, and serve my own homegrown apples with honey this year. I had eaten the first apple a couple of weeks ago (see August 9 post, A visit to Alex's garden in Spencerville) and was delighted that it tasted pretty good. I researched Jersey Macs on line, and learned that they are an early ripening fruit that does not keep well for long, similar to other Macintosh varieties. By the pictures of ripe apples, mine seemed a bit on the green side. After careful research, and the decision to leave the least ripe looking one up, but to gradually pick the rest this week, I went outside to put up a load of laundry and discovered two of my apples were gone. They were not on the ground below the tree. The kids and Josh swore they did not pick any. However, when I took my walk around the back to the patch of escaped garden beyond the fence, on the ground in the middle of the lane was one of my nicest apples with tiny bite marks taken out of one corner. I took a picture for posterity, but left the rest for the sneaky squirrels to finish. Conrad drove over it later in the day when he parked his truck, and a few days later, the rest of the squashed apple had disappeared. 

The back yard is full of spiders. I can't go anywhere without disturbing some web or other, and some are really quite beautiful.

They are hard to capture on film, but I managed to get a decent picture of an unusual web over my cucumber plants which was twisted (see top picture.)

This afternoon I was looking out the window and saw a monarch butterfly! It was the first wild one I have seen all summer. I was at the botanical gardens two weeks ago, and saw a short presentation on monarchs. During the presentation, the animator was tagging and releasing monarchs (until today, the only monarchs I had seen all summer).

Because of habitat loss, pesticides and other possible reasons, the monarchs are disappearing. More directly, they rely on milkweed for food and breeding, so it is the loss of milkweed which is most closely linked to the monarch becoming increasingly endangered. This year alone the population that overwintered in Mexico was 80% smaller than historic averages. The butterflies that hatch out in September are the ones that make the voyage all the way to Mexico, so at least here is one that will carry the future south. You can see it here sugaring up for its epic flight on Iulia's zinnias (seen from my side of the fence). I have been letting the random milkweed that have cropped up in my garden spread in hope that some monarchs may find refuge to lay their eggs in my yard, but so far we have not seen any caterpillars. Still, very exciting! I ran and got my camera. The monarch did not let me get too close, but obliged me with a couple of decent pics before flying in circles around Iulia's yard and flying west.

  So these days, we have been eating cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce and mystery greens (more volunteers), fresh, raw sunflower seeds, garlic, potatoes, carrots, fresh herbs, lots of basil, beans, more beans and more beans. Chloe sent us some beets, beet greens and watermelon, and tons of basil (I declined the beans, she also planted too many this year).

I would like to have included apples, but the squirrels got the rest before we did. We had only three of the seven. At least there are enough sunflowers to go around.