I feel like I spoke too soon on my last post. The weather turned colder right after, and at times it was absolutely bizarre. I woke to hear rain falling on the roof one Saturday in October, and when I made my way downstairs for breakfast, I looked out the window to see snow. I had checked the weather forecast for over the weekend throughout the week, as this is the time of the year things can change rapidly. On Tuesday, the forecast called for a low of 0. By Friday morning, the prediction had dropped to a low of -3 Saturday. I assumed the temperature would fall overnight, so I was taken by surprise to see snow in the morning. It was melting as it hit the ground, and soon turned back into rain. Midway through the day, the sky cleared to a beautiful blue and the sun streamed down. An hour later, it started to hail. It hailed long enough for piles of white pellets to collect on the ground and on car windshields. Being the Sabbath I merely watched from the window without running around trying to save what I could in the garden. Once it grew dark, and after a few hours of drier weather, I recruited Orianne and Isaac to help me throw tarps and blankets over the battered tomato plants, and carry the potted pepper plants into the house. After covering everything up, I went to pick up Zara from a friend's house, and walking across the grass to their door, I discovered the lawn covered with frost, sparkling in the dim light of the city. Very pretty, but not encouraging!
Last spring, Josh set up a permanent sprouting area in my laundry room, with full spectrum lights on timers. Half of the area is currently housing Josh's new mantis breeding project. He received a number of exotic mantis ooths from his entomologist friend in England (including ghost mantises and orchid mantises) . Promising that this time he would have the type of fruit flies that don't become an epidemic like our last project two years ago, I have agreed to share my laundry room with a bunch of "cool bugs," on the condition I have the space back in March to start next year's garden. The remaining half of the garden-starting area is now crowded with pots of hot pepper plants. I got all but three pots to fit, the others sitting on the floor behind me in the dining room. Over the past couple of weeks since they moved indoors to a heated room under grow lights, they are doing great and even flowering. I think I have found the trick to keeping hot peppers going indoors. I have been harvesting ripe peppers off the plant, and they are ripening a lot faster than they do outdoors. The ones upstairs by the window are slowly losing their leaves and the peppers are staying green.
I left the tarps and blankets over the tomatoes for a couple of days, hoping that the heat would keep them alive even in the dark. The sun came out again, so I let them take advantage of what heat they could get. I still had most of my tomato harvest green and not ready to pick. The forecast called for higher temperatures (up to 17) midway through that week, and I hoped that I could still get some tomatoes to turn orange before I picked them. My experience is that picking green and ripening indoors produces much crappier tomatoes than picking orange and letting them finish indoors. Neither is ideal, but the season of vine ripening is definitely over for this year.
Alas, it was not to be. That first frost was a hard frost, and repeated for 2 nights. The hail that pooled in dips in the ground did not even melt for a couple of days. The tomatoes that were not under blankets froze solid. Those that were covered looked more promising. I picked a bunch and although some did turn partially orange, the damage of the frost meant that they rotted as they ripened. That was the end of the tomatoes, as well as the last of the beans that I picked, which looked ok, and if I froze them directly would have probably been okay, but I hoped to eat them fresh and they wilted. The beans plants, the peppers that were planted directly in the garden and all the tomato plants were quite dead by the third week of October. I had just finished harvesting the last of the potatoes and carrots before, fortunately, but there was nothing I could do for the rest.
Surprisingly, a number of the flowers have ignored two frosts, more hailstorms, temperatures hovering around zero, and are still going. The monkshood is putting on a wonderful autumn show. Isaac helped me uproot the dying sunflowers in the back, but one surprise volunteer in the front yard which had not yet flowered, is trying to get a bud open before winter hits. One of the delphiniums, which had not bloomed with the rest, put up a flower stalk and is in full blossom, as are some purple flowers which I don't even remember planting, let alone what they are called. One of the stella d'oro lilies decided to have one last go. The calendulas are still blooming too. They are indestructible.
The last bit of harvesting we did was not technically in our garden. We have been taking lovely walks up through the old Blue Bonnets racetrack (redubbed the Hippodrome in its last years), which is not open to the public but easy to sneak into. We found some apples trees last fall, at the end of their harvest, so this year we monitored more carefully and discovered that of 5 trees, two have superbly tasty, crunchy apples, a bit sour and with interesting complex flavours unlike any apples I have ever had. We raided the trees and have been eating and baking them with great pleasure. We took Isaac and Lisa walking through. In addition to the wildlife (kestrels, turkey vultures, sapsuckers being among the birds I have seen, as well as signs of a coyote, skunks and rabbits), the wildflowers and the weekend model airplane club that uses the open sky to have their fun, there are also the old stables which have been redecorated by graffiti artists and are quite a surprising discovery. It has become a favorite walk for us over the summer.
This week, Isaac and Lisa have been a terrific help to Josh and me in cleaning up the garden and planting the garlic. I finally opened up the big heads of garlic which I set aside for planting and was surprised to find that many of them had only two or three massive cloves. Isaac was very disappointed that he had to peel so many tiny little cloves from the heads I put aside to eat, and these easy to peel big beauties were going in the ground. That's the way it goes, plant the best and eat the rest!
Because they were big rather than numerous, I had less cloves to plant than I expected, less than last year. I am hoping that because I put them in strategic places which get a lot of sun, (everywhere I had tomatoes this year), fed them fresh earth, manure and bone meal, and that they were on average bigger than any garlic I have planted to date, that the yield will be good despite the smaller number. There were 189 planted, compared to around 260 last year. This time I counted carefully. We are almost out of eating garlic. I had a few damaged cloves in the planting bin which have moved to the kitchen, and after we finish those, we are back to the crap from the store. Sigh.
One thing we decided to do this year was to harvest some horseradish for Passover. We had some discussion about how to do this. The horseradish had been growing several years from the top of a root we used on a seder plate. We tried to harvest some after a year but the roots were tiny and not of much substance, so we let it grow in a big pot to prevent it from spreading, with the pot sitting in our mint patch which is in a wide tub to prevent the mint from spreading. The horseradish has escaped occasionally, with a baby popping up in the mint, but I have rooted them out with no harm done. It has been a secure arrangement. I wanted to harvest it for last Passover, but it was frozen solid in the earth. We thought about bringing the pot in for the winter, but it is quite big and with the peppers inside there is not much room under the lights. One table with lights is covered with pepper pots, the other with some exotic mantises which Josh is currently breeding in the laundry room. Both peppers and mantises like natural light and heat. Josh will be selling the mantises to pay the electric bills. So no room for horseradish. I suggested that we bring it inside a couple of weeks before Passover to thaw and harvest in the spring. Josh liked the idea, and decided to lift the pot out of the mint patch so that it won't be frozen into the ground, and put it on a piece of wood in the backyard. Yesterday he and Lisa lifted the pot and discovered a long, long horseradish root had escaped through a drainage hole in the bottom of the pot and had grown along the bottom of the tub. This is probably the source of the baby horseradishes I had been pulling out.
Today I dug up the cana and the dahlia bulbs for winter storage and put the rolled up hoses into the shed. My last job outside will be cutting back the raspberry bushes, and then I am done for the season. We will still be harvesting hot peppers, maybe all winter, and making hot sauce. I have been saving peppers from this summer and last in the freezer, so we are overdue.
