Covid Fall 2020

This summer has been extraordinary in many ways. We had a long, hot dry spell in July. Then we had a hot August with plenty of heavy rain interspersed with scorching sun. It was far from ideal weather to have construction work done, as days were either too hot or too wet, or just threatening to be wet without actually raining. So I ended up spending much of the summer waiting each day to find out if I had any workmen coming. Projects ended up stretching out as the roofers who retiled my roof could only work in short stretches, the handyman who built my new shed had to leave it covered in a tarp for a few days before being able to get the roof complete, the company who put up my new gutters cancelled for several weeks until the weather cooperated.  Besides a few weekends visiting with my mother up north, I stayed close to home. I was not comfortable travelling or visiting people, so I had friends (singly) drop by my garden for a socially distanced visit. We ate outdoors often, and every single Friday evening throughout July and August had clear and beautiful weather, so we ate our sabbath dinners under the stars with a guest or two each week. On days when it was nice enough to go for a hike, but no workmen were present, I explored parks all around the edges of the island of Montreal and on islands in the river both to the north and south with my friend Olga.  The birdwatching was spectacular, and the views stunning. The rest of the time, I worked in the garden. 

I am proud to say that my enormous efforts digging meticulously and deeply to rid the vegetable garden of creeping bellflowers have finally paid off. I seem to have really gotten rid of the stuff. I have consistently ripped out any in the front yard that started to flower, which has prevented them from spreading to the backyard again, but I have given up on disentangling the roots from all my flourishing perennials. It will just have to be a chronic problem that I need to keep in check. 

This summer I successfully grew watermelons. Two of the plants I sprouted indoors survived this year. I am grateful that only two survived. They surpassed all expectations. I planted them ten feet away from the garlic patch, knowing they needed around 15 feet in all directions. Fortunately they only really started to hit their stride once the garlic was harvested, because they took over the entire area. I had nine watermelons that grew to maturity. One was eaten before I could harvest it. The entire inside was devoured through a hole the size of a baseball, so it looked perfectly good but when I turned it over I discovered that it was hollow, filled with rainwater and seeds which the squirrels had left behind. 

Fortunately the squirrels had only gorged themselves on one melon. I suppose it was because the apples were ripe at the same time, and were conveniently on the other side of the yard at the point farthest from my neighbour's dog. There were plenty of squirrels this year, more than I have ever had, and they were busy munching on whatever they could get their paws on. 

The watermelons all ripened the same week. This was unfortunate because they were the most fantastically tasty, sweet, juicy, crisp watermelons I have had in my life. We ate a lot of watermelon, but nine watermelons are a lot of watermelon. They were at their peak the week of the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashana, so I decided that the way I would wish friends and family a happy new year would be with the gift of watermelon. It was an unusual twist on the traditional apple and honey or pomegranate, but it was definitely sweet and fresh and seasonal. 

I also grew a single butternut squash plant. The butternut was at the center of the back part of the garden, also beside a patch of garlic, between the tomatoes, beans and bee balm. By mid August it had grown up the tomato cages, up the fence through the beans, across the bee balm patch and out into the yard in two different places. It is around the same size as the watermelon plant, and produced huge squashes. I kept finding more of them hiding in the flower bed, hanging down under the bean plants, growing in the tomato cage, hiding under the massive leaves. It is still blooming and has more small squash plants growing which might mature if the frost is late.  We have had roast squash, squash soup, squash and lentil soup, squash and chard tacos, and we have shared the gift of squash with neighbours, friends and family. I have one left in the kitchen (we needed a break). 

Everything was larger than life and more plentiful than I have ever seen in my garden, except for the garlic. It ripened early because of the hot, dry month of July. A lot of it was small, and many had only two large cloves. I separated the largest ones, and then made the mistake of leaving them in my laundry room which was too humid. I had a bloom of fungus across the top of the bowl, and some penetrated the cloves and ruined them. I had to pick through the bad ones and rescued what I could, then moved them up to my bedroom until it was time to plant. I have a smaller stock this fall, unfortunately, but hopefully undamaged by the mold.

It was not a great year for tomatoes. I planted them in the corner of the garden where I used to have raspberries, and some of the plants did not get enough sun. The cherry tomatoes are still green in mid-October. The rest produced at a good rate, and I have had tomatoes for much of the last three months at a pretty decent rate, but with all the rain I had a hard time keeping the bacteria in check. The varieties of tomatoes I bought this year (after half of my san marzano babies died early in spring) were not very resistant to the blight and my frequent spraying with hydrogen peroxide meant that I did get a good quantity of tomatoes, but they were quite spotty and some did rot.

 Once I started teaching in late August, I was spending much less time outside and the squirrels were quite bold. I have never had issues with them eating my tomatoes. I suspect it is because they dislike the chicken wire I use in the cages. This year, they were getting at any tomato that fell off, red or green, if I did not pick them up fast enough. The slugs were bad too later in the summer, munching the tomatoes, chard and even the outside of the squashes.

My mom gave me a couple of banana pepper plants that got huge and prolific.  The multi-coloured miniature sunflowers I have planted in years past were three times the size they usually are (and are still keeping the squirrels busy). One stunning red sunflower sprouted in the front yard, clearly planted by a squirrel or bird. One of my poppies was confused when we had a cold spell and the temperatures hovered just above zero and then warmed up again. It shot out 5 buds. In October. Poppies bloom usually in May, occasionally in early June. I have never seen one rebloom in the fall. My hyssop and elecampane were massive and covered with flowers. The milkweed had spread enough to attract monarch butterflies for the first time, although I only saw one caterpillar. Maybe there will be more next year. The calendulas are a riot of colour.  

The phlox were double in size . But of all the garden, the most interesting development were the cosmos. 

I adore cosmos. When you have a critical mass of them, they look like a green fluffy cloud topped by the kind of flowers that a small child would draw.  Every fall they drop seeds which migrate to unexpected places. Last fall, a few crossed the sidewalk to the new garden bed installed by the city of Montreal when they repaved the sidewalk after changing the water pipes. When the workers were pouring the cement, I asked if I could plant anything in the area, as it was clearly intended for that purpose. I was told I could not, it was city property. In the spring, woodchips were dumped in the beds of the three corners that were redone. No one came to plant anything. Weeds took root on top of the woodchips and geotextile. So did a few stray cosmo plants on my corner. No city workers came to deal with the corner plots, so I let the cosmos grow and pulled the weeds out of the space. Still no city workers came. The cosmos on my side of the sidewalk had grown in the cracks of my garden path, so I pulled them out and when no one was looking, stuck them across the sidewalk with the other escapees. It turns out that the patch, though a mere three feet from the edge of my property, gets several more hours of sun per day than my front yard. The cosmos across the sidewalk exploded in size and blooms. I only realized this evening that I took a photo just before they started blooming but somehow missed taking one when they were at their peak (I suspect that it was because I was back at work and super busy trying to adapt to teaching online, and was quite distracted by the amazing melons and squashes in the backyard that the cosmos, although much admired, missed the camera lens.)

I did, however, spend quite a bit of time gazing at them as they are directly in view of my dining room table where we ate all summer (the kitchen table was my son Isaac's work station until he started a new job in August, which, for various reasons, then made more sense to move to his bedroom). I was not the only one who loved to look at the cosmo patch. Many people strolling down the street stopped. In fact, walking on the sidewalk on my side of the street meant walking with a cloud of cosmos on both sides, shoulder high on the sunny side. It was quite spectacular. At one point a young couple stopped and embraced. It was such a charming spot!

Eventually in September, just around when the cosmos were at the peak of their flowering, the city workers finally did show up. I happened to be looking out the window when the truck pulled up. It was quite interesting to watch. A man and a women in florescent orange vests and hard hats walk out of a pickup truck with various gardening tools. The man crosses the street and starts cutting down the weeds in the sidewalk plot directly across from my yard. The woman looks at my cosmos. She hesitates. She crosses the street, talks to the man, then starts hacking at the weeds in the other plots. I watch for a while, then return to my 

bedroom/classroom/ office/yoga studio/dance studio where I am spending most of my waking and sleeping hours these days. Later in the afternoon, I look out the window downstairs to see two of the garden spots have been razed to the ground. My cosmos remain intact. I smile.  Emboldened, a few weeks later in early October, I grab handfuls of seeds from my dying cosmos and calendulas, and, when no one is looking, I steal across the street and expand my local guerilla gardening campaign. 

I have intended to keep up my blog this summer. I have had plenty to write and lots of great footage (which I have periodically shared on facebook). Somehow, though, once I was back at work in mid-August, then juggling Jewish holidays, launching two kids back to (online) school and the other one starting a new job and finding a first apartment (wow!), dating someone (imagine fitting in romance too), while surviving a pandemic, writing has taken a bit of a backseat. In fact, the only reason I have the time to finally do this tonight is that all my students are so busy writing assignments for me that they have left me alone, free of the usual barrage of emails that occupy my evenings. So I am taking a rare moment at midterm to do something I enjoy and record an extraordinary late summer and fall. As I write, the last of my sunflowers are blooming. My poppy seems poised to have a few more days of glory. The tomatoes are winding down but still giving me enough for daily use if not a surplus for freezing. The calendulas are glorious. I harvested and ate the last of the lettuce, pak choy and chard when frost was threatening, but some of my neighbour Iulia's greens (curly endive I think) had gone to seed and sprouted all over my side of the fence. So that is going into my fall salads. Interesting taste, similar a bit to arugula but instead of a peppery taste, these thin curly leaves have a horse-radishy bite. They make a nice mixer with romaine and red peppers and green onions. My basil is done, but the coriander is still blooming and has grown three feet high. I am hoping for some seeds before the frost. And my final flower of fall, the monk's hood, is at its most spectacular. With help from Olga, Zara and Ori, I have cleaned up around half of the garden beds and prepared them to plant next year's garlic. The rest will be put to bed soon, ready for a long winter.

 

More construction

 At the beginning of the spring, I went into the backyard and discovered that my temporary shed (built eleven years ago) was looking completely dead. The tarps were torn and shredded, the plastic poster-board roof tiles were coming apart. A lot of snow made it inside over the winter. Behind the shed, a whole section of the fence was tilted as one of the supports had rotted through at the bottom. I asked Josh to come over to put up the plastic gutters (which are not able to withstand winter, and come down every fall) and he discovered more of them were broken or missing parts which we could not find. I suspect they might have broken last year, and we were going to deal with it in the spring but neither of us remembered.  So we had a discussion about doing some much needed upgrading. I was somewhat more enthusiastic about it than Josh was, but I made my point about property values and beginning to look like a dump, and so I got busy finding the right people to get things fixed up.

I invited over a friend of a friend, who specializes in building sheds, decks and other backyard construction. He came over to discuss options for a shed. At one point he looked up at our roof and added another item to our "must do" list for this year. The roof at the back of the house was getting quite covered in moss. There had been a branch from the box elder tree beside the house touching it for a few years before I was able to get the city to finally trim it. During that time, there had been too much moisture on the roof, and the moss had dug into the tiles. We were informed that if we did not change the roof tiles, we risked much more serious damage to the roof structure which would be expensive to fix. So I added roofers to my list of professionals to find.

This summer has already had three intense heat waves, and up until the past two weeks a long dry spell. Then we had some heavy rain last week. This has made my garden super happy. Everything is big and beautiful. I am somewhat less happy, because I really do not like the heat, but managed to make the best of early mornings, evenings, and the occasional rainy or cool day to keep the weeds in check, so the garden is in pretty good shape overall.

I have discovered that two sections of the garden have become too shady for good growing. Some of my garlic came out quite small, and some of my tomato plants are not getting enough sun. The difference in size from those in one spot versus another is quite notable. I have decided to move some of the shade tolerating plants which I uprooted from the front of the old shed and put them in the patch between the mint and the bathtub. I just finally moved them from pots today after they had been in them for a month. I had to uproot them so we could dismantle the old shed, and then dig a shallow foundation for the new shed. Hopefully, that's next week's project. In the meantime, I have our bikes and a lot of other items under a tarp. The house came with a small shed which we are keeping, it used to make up the back wall of the old shed, and was packed with lots of things that were hard to access (and thus keep track of). We did a huge clean up job and got rid of all kinds of junk that was packed into it, so I am now able to use it more productively, and the new shed will have a fresh start. And place to keep our bikes!

 I got some advice and help from a neighbour who is a contractor in finding a really good roofer who did a great job. He just finished today, and I love what the roof looks like. I am not happy about what the garden in front of the house looks like, though. It was expected, like the proverbial eggs that you must crack to make an omelet. I had rescued a lot of plants (hostas, lilies, some irises, some of the evening primroses and goose-necked loosestrife, the delphinium and hollyhocks). I planted one of the hostas and one circle of stella d'oro lillies closer to the sidewalk in an area where I used to have more cosmos. Most of the rest of the rescued flowers are looking rather bedraggled. I waited until what I thought was the last possible day to uproot them, hoping that I would be able to get them back in the ground quickly. I also hoped that the plants I left behind (irises, geranium, lungwort, centaureas, campanulas, some of the primroses and loosestrife and lots of ground cover plants whose names I always forget) would be protected by the plywood and tarps. Sadly, neither of these hopes came to pass. Much of what I left in the garden was completely flattened or broken. The weather did not cooperate. It was unbearably hot and for days on end thunderstorms or showers were predicted (which often failed to come, resulting in ongoing heat). These are not great conditions for roofing work. What should have been a two-day job was spread over more than a week. The roofers had just managed to remove the tiles from one side and barely had time to finish putting up a water barrier on the first day, when the skies opened and it poured rain. They wrapped it up quickly (my roof, and the job) and left, drenched to the bone. On other days they had to limit themselves to a few hours of work in the morning before it hit 35 degrees (40 with the humidex. For my American readers, that is 104 degrees which never used to happen in Montreal. Ever!) So the plants that I rescued have been sitting in pots in the heat and are not looking too perky by this point. I am holding off on replanting because I suspect that the people installing the gutters are not likely to be any more gentle on my garden. I also want to clear the area of debris. This evening I began the fun process of picking up the bits of roofing tiles and hundreds of nails which have fallen all over the garden in the front, and the grass in the back.

 With all the heat, the garlic ripened early and the leaves were drying up and falling off. I decided to harvest all of them last week just before there were a few days of rain predicted. I am not sure if it is really an issue, but I have been told that garlic is best if it is dry just before harvesting, so it seemed to be a good idea. I had a smaller harvest than usual. I planted a smaller crop, because I was running out of space this year. Last October, I still had a lot of areas of the garden to clear of weeds, particularly digging out the roots of the creeping bell flowers. I have made a LOT of progress this spring and summer, but I could not have done it if I had to work around patches of garlic. So I decided to plant watermelon in one of those areas, because they only get big enough to need a lot of space by mid-July, which gave me three extra months to create the space. I am still a few feet ahead of the watermelon, but it is catching up fast.

I also did a lot of cleaning up in the bee balm beds. They have been spreading out into the garden, and getting tangled with all kinds of weeds. I moved them into a contained area and am still clearing out the last of the weeds, but it is looking a lot better. They are a bit less lush than they were years ago, but I think next year they will be spectacular again.

I discovered (the hard way) that baby coriander looks suspiciously like crabgrass when it starts to grow. This was a bit of a problem because this year I seem to have crab grass everywhere. Possibly not in the pot where the coriander is growing, but I will never know because I just picked it out before I realized that it might not have been crabgrass. So I will have very small quantities of coriander this year, which I plan to let go to seed, so that I will have much more coriander next year. Now that I know it looks like grass when it first pops up, I am more likely to have a good crop. That's the price I have to pay for doing such a good job of weeding. I usually cannot even see the coriander before it is big enough to be recognizably coriander popping out among the weeds. Live and learn!

Next to my potatoes, I planted some pak choy, chard and arugula a few weeks ago which I started harvesting for dinners this week. We also ate our first potato. Something had dug it up, took a bite and then changed its mind, leaving an almost intact, beautiful, freshly dug potato that was cooked into roti. Yum!

Tomatoes are a mixed bunch this year. The surviving tomatoes that I grew from seed are really small, and the ones which I put closer to the side fence are not getting enough light, so they are even smaller. I am not sure I will have the best of harvests, however with the heat I may end up with a decent crop. They may be a lot earlier than last year, if the heat continues. I already have a lot of green tomatoes.

I also discovered that tomatoes will grow from the seeds of green tomatoes. Iulia is having problems with squirrels eating her tomatoes, and as is their habit, they take a few bits, and then abandon their meal. As her tomatoes are growing along the fence between our yards, I have had a few dropped on my side by the squirrels. A few days later, baby tomatoes started to grow. I had no idea that the seeds were fertile before they were ripe.

I also have begun to suspect that my tomato cages have dissuaded the squirrels from eating my tomatoes. I have never had a problem, but everyone I know who grows tomatoes complains that the squirrels eat them. I did not even put out my usual squirrel deterrent this year. I still have plenty of coyote urine in the jar, but it does nothing to keep the squirrels off my apples or sunflowers, which seem to be the only things they are interested in eating from my garden. Unless they tried my potato... 


I am now waiting to hear from the people installing the gutters and building my shed. Hopefully everyone will come next week, and I can then replant the front garden. I have decided to move things around when I replant. The hostas have been buried behind other plants, and I need to put some tall flowers at the back. I am just hoping they have enough sun back there, but I will give it a try.