Winter of all weather

Today is February 28, not quite the end of the month as it is a leap year. This winter has had a bit of everything. Unseasonably warm weather, with the grass making some unexpected appearances, snowstorms, ice storms, lots of rain, a few very deep freezes. I drove to Guelph Ontario a few weeks ago to watch my daughter's orchestra perform, and was dismayed to see the Canada geese already flying overhead heading north. A few days later, the temperature plummeted, so I am wondering how they are faring. I also saw crocuses popping up. This is not supposed to happen in early February. This week we had an ice storm which fortunately did not last more than a day. It was miserable weather which has left many trees with branches torn off, but by the next morning most of the ice had melted which was fortunate. There was enough time for the water to drain off the streets before the next big freeze. Today it is snowing, and for a change looks like it is supposed to outside.

I have been growing violets (or pansies, I am still not sure of the difference) on the sides of my front stoop. A few years back, my neighbours removed their chimney and we took the metal insert, cut it into pieces, painted the pieces and use them as planters in the fronts of our houses. One set is taller than the other, so I have them as a two step decorative planter going along the front steps. In the top ones I put the violets, in the bottom, nasturtiums. They both seem to tolerate the amount of light they get, and the violets are protected from the voracious slugs that ate them when I tried them anywhere else in the garden. Generally the nasturtiums go to seed and replenish themselves from year to year, but the violets don't so I have taken to buying them in flats from Walmart as they are cheap and easy. This year, we had a relatively early frost that destroyed my tomatoes long before I was ready to call it quits. After the first two times we had frost, the remaining weeks in the fall were unusually mild, so whatever was not tropical or delicate kept on growing and blooming. The winners for the most resilience, that continued right through December was a sun-deprived sunflower which kept on trying to have its day in the sun, one I did not plant but popped up beneath my spruce tree, thanks to a squirrel most likely. It never managed to open the bud before winter finally took it. The biggest surprise was the violets.

I had a pot of freesias which my mother-in-law gave me a few years ago which was completely out of sync with the seasons. It came up mid-summer, and did not flower by the time the temperature dropped. For a couple of years I took the pot inside hoping it would flower, but no such luck. It would wither up and die, then come back again mid to late summer. Last year I decided to give up on it, and left it outside next to my stairs over winter. This year, late in the summer, something else started to grow that did not look like the freesias. It looked familiar but I was not sure what it was. As it was not harming anyone, I let it do its thing. By early fall, the plants started to bloom and I realized they were violets. The pot was directly below the violet pot, so seeds must have fallen.  I moved the pot to the top of the stairs next to my front door. At this point the rest of the flowers were dying off, so I decided to enjoy the late bloomers.

What amazed me was they survived the frosts, and kept on flowering. We had snow, the plants were buried for a week or so, then a thaw. Lo and behold, the violets sprang back up and continued to flower right into January. Eventually we had a deep freeze and more snow, and when it rained last week, I could see the violets again, they were quite flattened but their yellow flowers were still intact. I am curious to see what they do when the real spring starts.

I received a package of Jasmyn and Gu's garlic, which is sitting in my laundry room until I decide what to do. Plant indoors and see what happens? Plant outdoors in spring? Eat some decent garlic because I am so disappointed with the crap that is commercially available? They are much smaller than the ones they grew last year, or perhaps the small ones are the ones left this late in the year. Last I discussed gardening with Gu, he was getting rather frustrated with the amount of work it took to run a commercial organic garlic farm and was shifting his energies to teaching music.

I have been very fortunate to have picked up a teaching contract this winter, not full time, but there have been enough replacements that some weeks it has been more than full time, and other weeks I have time to spend with my parents who have been going through some rough times. I have not had much time to blog, nor much to write about yet. I have not planned out my garden, besides of course where to plant the garlic from last year. The fact that I am teaching and do not have a second part time (year round) job means that I will have the summer off and have time to garden (yay!)

I am planning to plant the tomatoes indoors earlier this year to maximize my crop. Will blog again once I have gotten started. Until then, hang in there. Winter is more than halfway over!

Endings

Usually at this time of the year the garden is at the very least dusted with snow, concealing the dead remnants of last years’ growth. This year, the ravages of global warming are apparent in the erratic and unpredictable weather. Early hard frost followed by milder than normal temperature and late colour change in the leaves. Periodic light snow, touches of frost and crinkly ice over puddles followed by days of warm rain. The last of the pansies are stubbornly continuing to bloom deep into December, and I have had some surprise late harvests of red lettuce, even a new one which grew right on the back lawn in the grass, which puzzles me. The lettuce is a bitter variety which I am the only one who seems to enjoy, more the pity for its hardiness. Still, the majority of the garden looks muddy and sorry, with dead stems and browning, rotting leaves exposed without the benefit of frosting or white blankets.

The days are long and dark and damp. Relentless rain and mist make the roads treacherous as we enter the holiday season. Not much joy abounds. My father is still in hospital after three months, and with a release date set for after New Years from rehab, a slow adjustment looms to a return home with a roomful of new equipment and protocols, losses great and painful. A long, hard winter ahead without promise of the joy of bounding through fresh snow on skis, walks through the woods. Instead, one slow, unsteady step at a time, with assistance and supervision. He will never again share in the produce of my garden, future meals a formula from Nestle delivered through the most direct of means. We find what joy we can in music, shared conversation, precious time spent together. The ending of many things yet not of what is most important, love, family, the joy of children.

At the time of the dying of the year, I have lost my best and closest friend, partner and lover. He tore a piece of my soul out of me when he walked away and left. Ripped a garden from my heart.

I end my year troubled and tired. My seed catalogues sit unopened. I walk in silence beneath the heavy grey skies treading on rotting leaves, and wonder if new life will return in the spring. 

Quick season change: first frost!

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.

Having pulled the end of the root off the bottom of the pot, Lisa volunteered to make some chrain!










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.

Thanksgiving and it feels like summer

I have been neglectful of my blog the past few weeks. With the exception of two or three days when it rained long and hard, it has been a fairly gentle autumn. There has been no frost as of yet, and although it has been chilly at night, we have had some really nice, sunny days. As I write this it is an unheard of 23 degrees, I am wearing a t-shirt, my windows are open, and I got a couple of mosquito bites picking raspberries.

They are still producing great quantities of fruit, while the alpine strawberries are slowing down, but still flowering and making a few new strawberries daily.

This has been a month of holidays for us. I last wrote just after the Jewish New Year, which was followed by the fast day of Yom Kippur, and then 9 days of partying in a Sukkah (we take our Thanksgiving pretty seriously). Josh feels very strongly about having guests as often as possible in our Sukkah, and as Jewish tradition holds that Sukkot is a holiday for all the nations of the world, we do our best to invite guests who are Jewish, who are not Jewish, who deny they are Jewish, etc.


In other words, we are as inclusive as possible in our "Hebrew Hippy Hut."


Josh was chatting with our neighbours across the street, a religious couple, about sukkahs: he went to see theirs, and they came to see ours. They were mutually impressed with the creativity of each other's sukkahs. Shortly after, their sons came to visit our sukkah and asked if they could feature it on the online Jewish blog Bill 613. It is on their Facebook page, as Montreal's Most Interesting Sukkahs number 10. I still had enough sunflowers and calendulas to put bouquets on the table.

This year was particularly special because Josh's sister Dahlia has been visiting with her daughter Ariella from Cape Town, South Africa. We have not seen them in 8 or 9 years, and as Ariella is the same age as my daughter Zara, as well as two of my nephews (2000 babies) it was a lot of fun for the kids to hang out and get to know each other better.

Not only did we have the family over for Sukkot (on one of the nights it poured rain, unfortunately), but just after the holidays were over, we invited the whole extended family to our house for a Friday night dinner. I think it was the biggest Shabbat dinner I have ever hosted, as my sister-in-law's family from Toronto happened to be coming in for the long weekend and a high school reunion, so we had EVERYONE here. It was loads of fun! 

Another unexpected surprise was my son Isaac and his girlfriend Lisa, after living in Wetaskiwin, Alberta for three months, decided they were not happy there, and it was quite expensive renting an apartment in nearby Edmonton. They are not sure of their future plans quite yet, but are back in Montreal for a bit until they decide what to do. They did not make it back for the holidays, but they arrived in time to join us for our big family reunion which was a real treat.


All this eating meant a lot of harvesting and food preparation, leaving not much time for blogging. As of today, I have finished harvesting the green onions, carrots, and potatoes. I have made a lot of mint lemonade which everyone loves. The mint is getting a bit ratty looking, so I have been cutting the new shoots only at this point, and have to wait a week between harvests. I still have lettuce and swiss chard.

The raspberries and strawberries and beans do not know when to stop, so I keep on picking them. I have gotten pretty good at making tarts.

I have left some of the beans to go to seed, and hope to cook them as well as keep some for seeds. Next year I will plant fewer, the quantities I have been harvesting are ridiculous. The colours (and size!) of the scarlet runners are amazing. Below are pictures of some which have already been drying for a few days, and another tray of ones I picked today.






There are two kinds of beans, the ones I got from Iulia (the big yellow ones tinged with pink or purple, whose seeds are pale yellow and dry to brown) and the scarlet runners, which are the big, hairy green beans, whose seeds start off bright pink and then become purple/pink swirl. I have not finished harvesting them all. There are a lot that are still small or at least tender enough to eat as is (those are the ones in the bowl that I picked today), and there is a limit to how many we can eat, so I am picking them gradually on both sides of the fence.

Some of the beans are a bit confused about the weather patterns, and I have opened some of the large ones and found the outside of the seed has already split open as if it is about to sprout. Those will be the first ones I will cook, I don't think they will keep well.




The massive squash plant behind the fence is putting out lots of flowers and some squashes have started to grow. They look like they could be decorative squashes. Maybe some will be ready to decorate our neighbour's for halloween (I believe that they grew from last year's halloween decorations that were left to rot in the corner of their driveway).


There are a lot of green tomatoes, and most of the hot peppers are still green too. Most of what survived to the end of the season were the volunteers which came up in early July, so they are just beginning to ripen. As long as we have some warm, sunny days left, I still have some harvesting, but I did not have buckets of tomatoes as I have had in years past.

On one of her visits, Dahlia had just gone shopping at Jean Talon market, and brought us a variety of unique tomatoes: bright orange, green striped with yellow (they looked like pickles), pale yellows. We kept some seeds to try out in our future gardens.












Some of the pepper plants started out in one of the hay bales. In late July, when they were not thriving, I gave up and transplanted them into the garden where they took off. They are now in full flower, so it maybe too late for them to fruit, but with a bit of luck we may get some green hot peppers and pick them immature.

The flowers are also ignoring the calendar and are continuing to bloom, including some new ones which held off until fall. The orange/yellow dahlia, which clearly did not get enough sun on the side of the house, has finally produced its first flower, once the other dahlia has finished. You can also see the tail end of the closed gentians in the picture (right). I don't think I got any pictures of the hibiscus, which bloomed big pink flowers throughout September.

My delphinium decided to bloom, I think this is a branch that did not bloom earlier in the summer. It opened up just before my monk's hood, which finally has started to open.


Iulia's has more direct sunlight, and bloomed around a month ago. As long as we don't have an early frost, it is fun to have a few late blooming flowers.



The sunflowers are at their tail end, producing some smaller blooms on the stalks that I have cut for bouquets or seeds (or those that the squirrels got.)


The calendulas continue to calendulate, and a whole bunch of new plants have sprouted up in the grass below where they grew this year. I am relieved, because it is too late for them to produce flowers and seed again, so maybe we will have a reasonable number crop up next year.

Or perhaps I will have a sale next year of my surplus.


The other annuals just keep on going too.


One of the stella d'oro lilies just decided to bloom again today!