That hay chick

I cannot believe how quickly time has flown the past few months. I keep writing blog posts in my head while driving around doing errands or taking the metro to work, but when I get home there is so much to do I just have not managed to get time to write. I had been very concerned about having enough work to keep my head above water, and balancing out the time to be as present as possible for my kids as a single parent. My father has spent almost as much time in hospital as out over the past year and a half, so no matter what I plan, I find myself needing to leave myself flexible enough to be able to fit in hours to advocate for my dad's needs, support my mom and drop everything to deal with a kid in crisis (we've had a lot of that this past year). End of summer comes, with the promise of full time work at the college still intact despite previous experiences of contract changes at the last minute, I get a phone call from the university where I work part time. Having decided to take the risk of not applying for courses there in order not to overload myself if the college came through, I found myself offered a night course just before the semester started. Not a new, unknown course, but my beloved Ethics course which I had already taught seven times. I said yes. My full time course load at the college came through too. In fact, expecting a certain drop off of work load, I was given more than full time hours. The work load did not drop much and mid-August, just as harvest starts to really pick up, I started the busiest schedule I have ever had in my life. So I dropped off the internet. No time for Facebook. Definitely no time to sit and write for the pure pleasure of writing. I did not even look at my stats until I was at the end of my Christmas vacation, when I was surprised to see that I have had hundreds hits on my blog despite the complete lack of activity. So I decided that I owe it to my fans and followers, if not the random spammers out there who just might get interested in gardening, to post an update.

As I write, this is my last Monday free for a long time. I already starting teaching the three (yes, three!) sections of the Ethics course I have this term, and will be starting supervising stage students at the CEGEP on Thursday. My dad is back in hospital, so will be spending the afternoon with him. I planned to check my emails from my students first, then decided that they will wait, as will the workout which I am overdue for. This hour is mine to write.

So first of all, the hay saga. Around Halloween, I started noticing how many stores, bars and restaurants had put hay and straw bales outside their businesses as part of their fall/Halloween decorations. One evening in early November I was walking to the metro from work, and on a whim, walked into a restaurant with a pile of hay bales in front and asked what they were planning to do with them. The manager said that they were throwing them out on garbage day, but was very willing to let me take them now if I wanted. I asked if I could come back in a day or two with a car. Garbage pickup is in two days. I came back and stuffed a couple of the wet, mouldy bales in my trunk. I did not have time to return for the rest before they were gone, but it was free and much faster and less traumatic than renting a truck and digging the deteriorating bales from a hay loft, tossing them out the window and trying to reform them enough to transport them home. I began to scan for other leftover bales and spotted a pile in front of a restaurant in NDG. This time I called to ask about the hay. The owner told me to call back to speak to his wife as she is the person to decide. He was most puzzled by my request, and mentioned that a few other people had passed by to ask about using the hay when he was done. I waited to the next morning and called again. The owner I had spoken to answered, so I asked for his wife. "Oh, you're that hay chick, aren't you?" I have been called many things, but hay chick is a new one for me. Graciously they let me pick up their bales, which turned out to be straw, and were much smaller and easier to fit in the back seat and trunk of the car. I figure that if I can collect more hay than I can use next year, I can spend more time next Halloween "recycling" people's decorations, and I am making a mental list of businesses that use hay or straw to decorate.

On the Halloween theme, my mystery squashes continued to ripen after we ate the first one for Rosh Hashana dinner. I was mistaken in thinking that it was a green, pumpkin shaped small round squash with pale yellow-orange flesh and a very delicate flavour. That's what it looks and tastes like when it is unripe. As I wrote at the beginning I got ridiculously busy with the rest of my life, and we had a very long autumn and late frost so my tomatoes and raspberries were going full tilt right through to the beginning of November. My freezer is quite full of tomato pulp. I have one remaining garlic left from my quite copious harvest (many are in the tomato sauce frozen in the basement as well). The squash continued to ripen until they turned orange so I picked all but one which was buried in the area where the overgrown raspberry patch collided with the overgrown tomatoes. They were very tasty, close in flavour to butternut squash, so I kept some seeds. The last one turned up when I finally pulled out the frost damaged tomato plants the second week of November, in preparation for planting the garlic (barely made it before it was too cold. We had a hard frost then a couple milder weeks). The last squash had gone yellow, and before I cut it open to cook, it had already started to rot so I tossed it in the compost. I also harvested the corn. As I had planted it late, it was not ripe yet as we drew near to the frost date, but I did not care. I have yet to successfully grow a corn to full ripeness without having the crows get it first, so I decided to go for baby corn. I picked around five heads and they were quite large compared to the commercial baby corn you buy, but the flavour was wonderful and the texture the same. I cut them up into a delicious Chinese stir fry. That you to my sister-in-law Dahlia for the seeds.

Having had squash, corn and beans growing in different parts of the garden, unplanned, this past summer, I decided maybe to organize a repeat of the experience more effectively for next summer. I did some reading on the three sisters and the advantages of growing corn, beans and squash as a unit. One surprise to me was that squash keeps critters out because the vines and leaves are scratchy and irritating. My squash grew along the back fence, which was how the ground hog liked invading my yard, but his (her?) presence mysteriously declined as the squash plant grew. I think there may be a connection. I kept some of the seeds of the squash, whose identity is still undetermined, for another round next year. Anyone who can identify it please let me know. Seeds available to share!

The pictures in this post are from November. I was still picking enough raspberries up until the second week of November to make a pie per week on top of what the kids were munching. My monk's hood flowers were very late but managed to full flowering before the snow. The violets survived a few frosts, and over the Christmas holiday a thaw exposed the plants which are still green and look ready to bloom if given the opportunity.  The calendulas kept calendulating until covered in snow. In November, the city painted some lines indicating where they will be digging up some pipes on my lawn directly under a section of my front garden, so I engaged Josh's help to uproot and move a section of the flower garden that had some fancy lilies and other perennials to the back yard a few weeks before the frost to give them time to settle in. They are in a section in the middle of the back yard where I had garlic this year and tomatoes last, so will need to find them a new home in the spring.

I grew over 250 garlic bulbs this past summer, which was a delicious, ambitious project, but used up so much garden space that I had difficulty rotating next year's crop to areas that have not had garlic for a few years. I ended up opening up a new space on the back lawn, and will likely leave some areas fallow. Tomatoes are likewise a problem to rotate now. At least my contracts end before planting season so I hope to have some time to work on this logistics problem for the long term.

My last update is about my favourite tree. In my neighbour's back yard, the magical, double ash has been infested with emerald ash borers. One of the two twin trees was clearly dying fast, the other starting to succumb, and Iulia and Ovidiu were too late to salvage the situation. In November, a crew of tree specialists spent three days taking down the behemoth.

No longer do I look out my bedroom window into a canopy, where I have watched raccoons, squirrels and countless birds (including kites, migrating songbirds and more). There is an empty space behind which is an ugly urban landscape. I will, however, have a lot more sun in the garden so who knows what that may lead to.

The winter finally descended and all is quiet on the garden front. The pile of hay and straw bales is cloaked in snow. My compost is a bit tricky to manage as the hay is frozen solid so I am waiting for a warmer day to put out the next bucket. I have no time to really think about what I will do next year, but am considering how to cut back on mid-fall harvesting (my favourite crops!!) to avoid having to do it by flashlight after a long day mid-semester.

I may not have much to write before I plant seeds in March, but will pop in from time to time before planting time to keep you up to date. Have a very happy and fruitful new year!