Category Archives: my garden

Fall Garden Report

my garden,

My husband and I have been cleaning the yard up this week. I’m putting in some greens for the winter, and some cooler-season flowers, and we are already talking about how to improve our harvest next summer. So I thought I’d write notes about this summer’s results.

Butternut Squash:  6 fruits (two of them pretty small) from 16 plants. Considering we didn’t have a warm summer that isn’t too bad. (My best year was 10 larger fruits from 20 plants.) But, also considering that B. doesn’t like squash, I might give that space to tomatoes next summer, when we will be making the Concerted Tomato Effort. The butternuts in the store aren’t as good, but I can live with that.

Tomatoes: We grew 8 plants, 8 different varieties this year. Terrible year for tomatoes, but the scorecard for the various ones:
*Early Girl: Still the most dependable, and the flavor in September can’t be beat. I want to plant two of them next year.
*Grape: This is the 4th year I have grown these, and they are wonderful in all the usual ways, except that this year for some reason the fruits were tinier than grapes.
*Green Grape: These were vaguely grape-shaped, but huge for a cherry type, more like a small plum. The flavor was good and they were healthy and productive, so I might plant them again. I like having a green cherry for the color in salads and such.
*Andy’s Polish Pink: We got at most 3 good fruits from this plant, and when we pulled it up, its roots were not deep. Early in the season the tomatoes were mushy. It’s not worth trying again to see if more heat would improve them.
*Faribo Goldheart: The few fruits we got were tasty and beautiful orange tomatoes. A couple of them were the largest of all our tomatoes this year. Worth trying again.
*Orange Fleshed Purple Tomato: I picked this up at the big box store, part of their effort to stock a few heirlooms. It didn’t make many tomatoes and they were so disappointing–now I forget all the reasons–that we pulled the plant out early.
*Yellow Cherry: This has been the best of the lot this summer. It’s quite a bit like Sungold, but its skins aren’t so thin. It’s been a good producer and very sweet.
*Black Cherry: It was hard to tell when these were ripe, and when they were, they quickly got soft, and their flavor was blah, so I don’t want to plant them again even though the bush was productive.

Peppers: Nothing produced well, of the Anaheims or Pimientos or the other two interesting ones. But they were in a spot that didn’t get enough sun. More and more of the garden is like that, unfortunately. B. wants to plant Pimientos again next year in a place where they did really well in the past.

Basil and Arugula: Always easy, and did as well as usual. Actually better–last year the basil seemed to suffer, maybe from too sunny a spot. This year I put it back in the old place, where it gets no sun until the hottest afternoon rays. The picture is of arugula seeds I collected.

Lemon Cucumber: We got enough for our use, which is very minimal. I may not plant these next year because they are available locally at the market, and we need the space for other things.

Green Beans: Blue Lake are the best! We got a good amount, and since we love them so much, we will probably plant them again, and maybe in the same spot, as it is one of the few places where the runners can’t disappear into a tree or the neighbor’s yard.

New Zealand Spinach: Some of these starts I planted in a too-shady spot, and they never really grew. The others were in a place that gets sunshine all day long, and they grew vigorously, but the leaves are small.  The stems are tough on this plant so I haven’t bothered to use much. I’d like to try this old favorite again next spring, in a place with a little shade.

We Need Food of All Kinds

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Soldier’s wedding will take place in a few days.  Mr. Glad and I are just trying to get ourselves and the house and my father-in-law ready for the Joyous Event–and trying at the same time to get over our summer colds. I was pleased to pick the first lemon cucumber and add it with our arugula and the multi-colored cherry tomatoes to some lettuce last night, to fortify us for the work, and for the happy busyness ahead.

This morning I was well enough and eager to get back to church, where we remembered the life of St. Lawrence of Rome. God has filled my cup with delights like this–how many parishes are able to celebrate on a Tuesday morning?

St. Lawrence was a deacon serving with Pope Sixtus in the third century; his life and martyrdom are peppered with several encouraging stories. He seems to have had a good sense of humor, and among the various groups who call him patron are comedians.

G. K. Chesterton said it is the test of a good religion, whether you can joke about it. I’m sure he didn’t mean anything like mocking God or His salvation. But being able to laugh at oneself is a sign of humility, and I think it might be a collective form of this humor he is talking about. The whole subject of humor is something mysterious to me, and I would do well to study Chesterton’s other writings about it. For now I will change the subject after my favorite pertinent quote, also from him: “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”

I came home from the feast and noticed the hyssop flowers having grown taller and taller. Bees were drinking nectar from the blooms, but bees are hard to photograph–one has to take time and a couple dozen pictures in hopes of getting one without a blur of bee, and I have lots of housework yet to do.

My life is like my garden. It’s full of beautiful and colorful things and events, ever changing, and I notice so few of them. Fewer still can I pick and show anyone else. My sociable or communicative side I find is always writing script in my mind, for how to tell other people about my discoveries and joys. But when the foliage and flowers grow so fast, events tumbling and intertwining with each other like a jungle, the feeling of not keeping up has been a gift in itself. From a feeling of helplessness, God has given me grace to just stop that script-writing for a few minutes at a time and direct my noticing and my thanks only to Him. Let me be like the bee, blurry if need be, but doing my job of imbibing the sweetness.

Foggy Flowers

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Yesterday the sun never did come out. They say our summer is 4° cooler than average, but it seems worse than that, especially when the morning fog continues all day. It’s making me slow and dull this morning.

I was busy in the kitchen yesterday, so it didn’t bother me too much. The lack of bright light made it possible to take flower pictures, so I did catch my new hyssop plant that has reached 4 feet! I bought the hyssop back in April, in a 2″ pot as I recall, but I can’t find a picture of it as a baby for comparison. It did grow fast.

 

The New Zealand Spinach I was so pleased to find at the plant sale has done beautifully. This is what it looked like back then:

Earlier this month I made some Creamy Green Soup using the first pickings, shown in this bowl, which you can’t really tell is 16″ in diameter. Creamy Green Soup is a recipe I got from Laurel’s Kitchen long ago. It is infinitely variable, depending on your whim and what greens you have around. This last time mine had split peas, this spinach, onion and garlic and basil in it….maybe some other things, certainly butter. It’s nice to add a little cream or cheese, too.

The nasturtiums I planted all over the back yard are doing famously. I remembered at least once to put three colors of their petals in a salad. Now I really must go upstairs and do some ironing. Maybe it will help warm me up on this wintry summer day.

God is constantly willing.

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Weeds grew thick and tall in my recent and repeated absences, threatening to hide and destroy the beauty of the garden I’d planted. This morning I spent an hour tidying things up and giving space to the cucumbers and peppers so that they could grow unhindered. I’d hired a girl to irrigate enough to keep everything alive, but I didn’t ask her to pull weeds.

(Unripe grape tomatoes above, nasturtium in arugula below. All pictures taken just this evening.)

While hauling several baskets full to the trash I remembered my own advice to another young friend who was just falling in love with gardening. She asked me whether I thought she should do a little bit of garden work every day, or spend a couple of hours one or two days a week. I told her that the best way is to tend it a little bit every day. There is always a weed to pull, a tomato branch to be tied up, or a dead flower to be clipped off. The plants need water, and food, perhaps even a little shade from time to time.

One year our Baby was raising a pumpkin she hoped would be a huge one she could enter in the local Giant Pumpkin Contest. We were told it was advisable to put the growing pumpkin on a pallet when it was still small so that it could stay dry and be easily moved no matter how large it grew. When I got around to helping my daughter with that part of the project the fruit wasn’t very large yet, but the stem, having lain on the moist ground, had already sent out roots into the soil. This situation was hidden by a canopy of leaves, and when we hoisted the pumpkin on to the pallet, the vine stayed anchored by those roots, and the pumpkin broke off at the stem.

That was a hard lesson. I thought sadly of how a farmer, even a novice homeschooling pumpkin-grower, can’t afford to procrastinate. Any job involving a living thing has to be paced according to that creature’s rate of growth. And agriculture usually involves many living things all in relationship to one another: the plant, the soil, pests with their own life cycle, and probably others I’m not thinking of, not being a very good farmer still.

This morning’s brief mediation on how I really ought to tend more constantly to my garden continued when I later sat down at the computer to read the transcript of an interview with the Orthodox theologian and writer Vigen Guroian in which the topic of conversation turned, as is usually the case with him, to gardening, and he said “…were not God constantly willing His creation, loving His creation into existence, it would disappear.”

From my perspective as a lazy, distracted, and time-constrained gardener, I appreciate the steadfastness of our Lord in continuing His creative work moment-by-moment.  Colossians 1:17 says that he “holds all creation together.” I am one of His creatures, whom so far He has seen fit to give life and breath to every morning, making it possible for me to tend my own mini-garden, which also couldn’t live without His blessing and daily upholding.

Something G.K. Chesterton said on the subject often flits through my mind, when musing on this subject. He said, that in contrast to children, who through excess of vitality want things repeated, “…grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough… It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again,’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again,’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

So far, the garden hasn’t seemed monotonous to me. Every day is different there. Of course, The Creator is making the daisies, and I get to discover them, along with the roses and budding fruits and spreading spinach. I do love my garden, and will try to be more constantly willing to keep it going, imitating my Lord.