Tag Archives: autumn

We like rain on our parade.

my garden, , , ,
P1110712 giants window art
window art at the market

Two special blessings today, neither having to do with Halloween. Our baseball team the San Francisco Giants were back in town (We consider them our team though we don’t live in San Francisco) after winning the World Series in Kansas City earlier in the week; they have won the series three times in five years. Today was the parade and ceremony to celebrate and honor the team and it was also a rainy day.

ConsideringPeets roosters the drought, no one of the thousands of people in attendance seemed to mind the rain one bit. Several speakers at the ceremony mentioned it as an extra blessing and even thanked the rain as well as every human participant. Mr. Glad and I were here in our town watching some of the festivities on the computer and we left the door open to the back yard so we could hear the rain. Everything smells fresh and fallish.

It was a good day to go to Peet’s and buy some coffee beans. A flock of roosters calls that parking lot their home, and they P1110719didn’t mind the rain, either.

Earlier in the week when we were watching a World Series game that our team lost, we had son Pathfinder here to eat dinner with us, and I made an old family favorite that I thought he might like, Fiesta Corn. I’ve read recipes for this that call it Mexican Spoonbread. It’s cheesy and corny with some green chiles, and I forgot to take a picture of it cut into a slice.

zinnias pink 1 bush 14The zinnias are putting on their final show pre-frost. This one pink bush has been the biggest producer of blooms, and has converted me from my former stance against this color of zinnias. The flowers look even nicer and last longer now that they don’t have the sun beating down directly overhead. (The picture also shows a few of the gazillion redwood needles that fall in our yard from the tree over the fence day after day and demand our attention.)zinnias halloween 14

My favorite orange variety seem to really like the cooler weather; I even had enough to make an all-orange-zinnia bouquet with some sage and fennel flowers.

steppingstones 10-14As of yesterday morning I still had not prepared the soil for my new planting out front, and I knew the rain was coming and would gum up our adobe soil again for who knows how long. So I put aside all the indoor tasks and began to hack at the brick-like dirt with my shovel, hoping just to get some bags of compost mixed into the clay before the showers began last night.

I managed to do that and also to collect some odd steppingstones from here and there to heave into tentative places. I didn’t die, but before I was halfway done I was lying on my back on the crunchy former lawn berating myself for ever committing to that project in the first place. I am too old for this kind of fun!pumpkin display

 

The same market that had the Giants cheer on the window has this lovely display inside, with all things pumpkin including hard pumpkin cider, which if I had had the foresight to pick up a bottle, would be the perfect way to celebrate all of this week’s special blessings. Most of all, rain!

 

Feelin’ good in the fall.

my garden, , , , , , , ,

P1110683It feels good to have our favorite baseball team playing in the World Series, and as I type the San Francisco Giants are playing the third game against the Kansas City Royals. I come over to the computer during the commercials and sometimes also when I am too nervous watching the Royals at bat.

We went to one of our favorite nurseries today, driving through vineyards and brown fields and clumps of oak trees, under a blue sky. As soon as I heard that we were headed out into the country, I was so excited, anticipating strolling around in the pleasant air. It felt good to wash all the dishes that had piled up – then we were off.

P1110677 verbena sidewalk

At the big nursery we were the only customers for a while as we browsed the perennials for a few drought-tolerant plants to use as ground cover in the front yard. One of the plants that was suggested to us was this verbena that we knew was already blooming all over the sidewalk at home, where I later took this shot.

At the garden center I had to keep reminding myself that we don’t have space for this or that beautiful or interesting plant, but I did remember to buy a little bay tree, inspired by some of you who mentioned that you grow them in pots. It’s a Grecian bay, bearing the type of leaf one buys in the spice section of the market, and not the California Bay Laurel that is native around here, which would outgrow a pot too fast, I think.

P1110668contest

On the way home we stopped at our favorite fruit stand where they had a contest going to guess the weight of this pumpkin. We tried to recall the size of that ton+ pumpkin in my recent post, and put in our guesses for this one at about 1300 and 1400 pounds.

Last week I found some of my all-time favorite Pippin apples in a store and made some killer apple crisp to share with friends, and my love for apples was rekindled. Cooking and eating apples when they are in season, coming off the trees in our local orchards, is the way to go. Too many times in the last year or two I have tried to make something appley with apples from across the world, or fruit that had been languishing in cold storage. I hope I have learned my lesson now. Today I bought some more Pippins at the fruit stand and once again have a stockpile of substantial, useful, and of course tasty emblems of the harvest season.

P1110679 plants

Here are the plants we came home with. Left to right: Australian Astroturf, Scleranthus biflorus; Lawn (flowerless) Chamomile, Chamaemelum nobile; Pink Chintz Thyme; the bay tree. P1110689 osmanthus & project

Our project is to put some steppingstones and ground cover into an area of our dead lawn not far from the front door, in the lower right-hand corner of this picture that is mostly taken up by just half of the sweet olive (osmanthus) bush. It’s a pleasure to work close to the osmanthus, because it’s so often bearing its tiny perfumed blossoms that I have gushed about in this space more than once. They are doing that right now. P1110684 osmanthus flower
A couple of weeks ago I dug big clumps of orchard grass out of this lawn area, and this afternoon I got a little more done removing the grass thatch that is embedded in adobe clay. Eventually I will add some compost and the new plants.

P1110671 zinnias

Meanwhile the trailing zinnias are thriving in the slightly cooler weather. They are my autumn decorations and I don’t at all mind not having a pumpkin or a gourd out front. Anyway, I already have a box of plants taking up space on the front step and who knows how long they will have to hang out there.

And look at this darling portulaca blossom. It is so little that I didn’t notice the much tinier insect inside until I had enlarged its picture. Since I planted it the cistus nearby has grown by leaps and bounds and overshadowed the  portulaca, so I have to poke my camera underneath to catch a flower.

P1110691 portulaca & insect

I’m sorry to say that between the time I started writing and now when I am finishing this post, Kansas City won the game. But tomorrow is another chance, and Sunday, too. We will watch one of those games with some friends, and maybe eat apple crisp together. I’m feeling good about it already.

Smelling the decorations.

my garden, nature, , ,

It’s the time of year when I go into the garden and get high on the aromas coming from the earth and the air. My immediate impulse is to take pictures of all the plants and trees that are making me love them and making me happy. I get them uploaded and find out that actually nothing looks that great: shriveling tomato vines with rotting fruit and flies underneath; weeds mixed in with the leaves blown in from the neighbors; redwood branches cluttering the surface and bottom of the swimming pool.

Around here, the excitement is coming through the senses other than the visual. Just taking some time to skim the debris poms 14from the pool somehow feels fallish to me, and is very relaxing, as I listen to the blip-blip of the water, and make things tidier there. Even though the afternoons have been hot, you can tell that it’s not summer, maybe because the rays of the sun are coming at a slant so the heat is less direct.

At the market, I’m back to the visual; heaps of pumpkins look extravagant and appropriate, signifying the abundance coming from the farms. From the highway I can see fields of corn, some of which will be carved out with paths to make a maze for the schoolchildren to wander through. And on my kitchen counter fields of tomatoes look normal for this time of year.

For many years I’ve made a habit of buying a pumpkin or two, to put on our front step, but this year I’m restraining myself. They never look as nice when I separate them from the crowd where they seem to belong, especially when squeezed into a corner on the concrete by the door. I’m not ppump bread joy 14repared to spend a bundle to buy a crowd of them with which to make a mountain on our dead lawn, though this would be the year of opportunity!

So this time, I will enjoy looking at the piles at the stores — or on Pinterest. To add to our tomato decor I bought some pomegranates, which fit better in our space, and turned out to be much more economical.

But wait — I’m not going to forsake pumpkins altogether. My favorite market didn’t have any little pie pumpkins today, but soon I will find some and invest in a couple of them so that I can have the best fruit for cooking up a pie or bread like DIL Joy brought us last weekend. That’s the way to turn a visually pleasing pumpkin into an olfactory autumn event. Mmm-mm.

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As the sun at noon.

poetry, , , ,

This poem by John Donne I believe did not start out as a poem. Someone posted it as follows, in poetic lines, but I found the same lines as prose on Bartleby.com, in the middle of a passage in “Sermons Preached on Christmas Day.” Donne evidently did not give the title “In Heaven it is Always Autumn” to anything, but more than one person has more recently used his line to title a poem, as I found in my searching.

Donne uses several vivid words to describe the winter we can experience in our soul at any time of year, showing that he is familiar with that inner dark and coldness. We know that he did suffer terrible grief when his wife died, and it was doubtless not the only occasion when he felt desperate need of God’s presence and mercy.

What an encouraging word the preacher poet brings out of his training in God’s ways, able to comfort us “benighted” ones with the comfort that he has been comforted with, as in II Cor. 1:4. Because these thoughts were part of a Christmas sermon, I thought of sharing them later at Christmastime, but taking my cue from the first line extracted, and because it happened to be in the current season of the year I needed a reminder of God’s thawing Love, I’m not waiting.

“In heaven it is always autumn,
His mercies are ever in their maturity.
We ask our daily bread
And God never says
You should have come yesterday,
He never says
You must again tomorrow,
But today if you will hear His voice,
Today He will hear you.
He brought light out of darkness,
Not out of a lesser light;
He can bring thy summer out of winter
Tho’ thou have no spring,
Though in the ways of fortune or understanding or conscience
Thou have been benighted til now,
Wintered and frozen, clouded and eclipsed,
Damped and benumbed, smothered and stupefied til now,
Now God comes to thee,
Not as in the dawning of the day,
Not as in the bud of the spring
But as the sun at noon,
As the sheaves in harvest.”

– John Donne, 1624