tatsoi | Gladsome Lights

In spite of my absence for various reasons, the garden continues to carry on valiantly its business of growing and changing by the hour. I love walking around and picking off a few dead flowers, or noticing seeds forming, even when I can’t give it the more thorough care it needs.

A couple of years ago I managed to transplant one of the vigorous Showy Milkweed plants (above) next to where the Narrow-Leaf Milkweeds grow. You can’t see the latter very well in the background, which is a good thing, because their leaves have mostly had the life sucked out of them by aphids and have turned black. But every spring, they come back stronger than ever.

The leafy green Tatsoi really took off in this pot where I stuck it in next to lobelia, and is begging to be thrown into a stir-fry a.s.a.p. Those I set out in the planter boxes are languishing; that soil must need amending.

The dwarf pomegrantes are mostly a fun member of the garden in that for most of the year have flowers, often with hummingbirds drinking from them; or foliage bright and beautiful catching one’s attention in spring and fall; and their darling fruits, that don’t get very large, and in this climate don’t get enough heat for their seeds to develop sweetness. But they are so cute right about now. This one is about an inch and a half in diameter.

Every day I pick figs; the evening of my return from the mountains I gathered two dozen, and yesterday nineteen. Soon I hope to make that Autumn Fig Cake I told you about one time. And the Juliet grape tomato plant is prolific. I eat the tomatoes in the garden and in the kitchen, and took enough with me to the cabin that I could eat a few every day for ten days, and they were always sweet.

I harvested all but one of the little butternut squashes I grew this year, and planted some Sugar Ann snap peas in their place. Ideally those will start bearing about February, if the winter isn’t too cold and if I can keep the snails from devouring the plants between now and then.

My native sneezeweed is of the less showy sort, but it welcomed me when I returned from my mountain retreat with a particularly lovely array of blooms, not plain at all.

No doubt about it, my garden loves me, and forgives my neglect.
It makes me want to do better in the future.

Granddaughter Maggie was here for a few days with her mother Pearl. Maggie continued her road trip back to college but Pearl is with me still. They fill my heart and my days by being their sweet selves. Since I typically do all my own work, I am constantly startled when I notice that someone is loading the dishwasher or shredding the lettuce for tacos or whatever task, before I even get to the point of realizing it needs doing.

We went wine tasting for a short while one day; at one vineyard we took a one-mile walk through the rows of vines, and it smelled really good in there: chardonnay, cabernet, syrah, viognier, dried grass, all lending their scents to the air, but mildly, because it was a coolish day.

The next day, to the beach! Pearl and I walked down the shore quite a way, and when we came back we all just lay there in the sun. I lost consciousness for at least a few minutes, lying on my back with the sun heating my face through my hat. As we stared out past the edge of land to the vast Pacific, Maggie said that the ocean seems to our eyes as big as outer space. I thought how nice it would be if I could restart the regular beach outings that I made so often in 2020 and 2021.

My granddaughter spent quite a while collecting tiny pieces of sand. She was conceiving a plan to use them in the Instagram-alternative scrapbook she is starting; she will glue them on to the page and then paint over them with clear nail polish so they might continue to look wet.

That evening we were able to sit on the patio for a dinner that I made, which included chard from my garden. I had washed it up a few days before, during which process I realized that I had four varieties of Swiss chard growing out there.

I pulled out some of that chard, to make room for new plants that I grew from seed in the greenhouse over the last month, and most of which I have set out in the planter boxes. Portuguese Kale, two varieties of collards, Italian Silver Rib Chard — and a new one from the mustard family: Tatsoi. Here it is when its true leaves were barely emerging.

Also Detroit Red Beets. If half of the seedlings I set out thrive, I should have plenty of greens to get me through the winter and into next spring.

Lastly, I show you the barrel planter, where the the snapdragons and Tropical Sage seem to take care of themselves and keep reseeding and blooming. The salvia that was pink for two or three years just last week sprouted stems of red-orange flowers. I saw them from the kitchen window, and had to run out right away to see what they could possibly be. When I give my attention to the garden, even just a little bit, it rewards me abundantly.