Last Gasp

November has arrived, and we still have daytime temperatures in the mid-80’s. I think this is the last gasp; it looks like next week, temps go down to the 70’s, and nighttime temps start to firmly lodge in the 40’s. It’s about time, and it sure would be nice to see some hint of rain.

Bishop’s Lace

The garden is moving on, mostly according to plan. I’ve had a few failures. Something completely eviscerated the beets and kohlrabi, and I’ve had a terrible time germinating spinach this year. The cabbage I started and planted out (an Italian Savoy type) has not fared well, and in that space, there are volunteer potatoes coming up (which isn’t a bad thing). I have more seedlings in the greenhouse of all those things, as well as chard. I’ll plant those out this weekend. I’ve also re-seeded in several places in the beds.

Shallots

I’ve had a tip that I should order garlic directly from Filaree Farm next year. They do have a lot of varieties, all organic. I would like to support a CA farmer, but I am unable to find anyone that will sell directly to me. If you know of any, please share the info.

I’ve ordered new asparagus crowns from Renee’s. They won’t ship until March. Our old asparagus bed was badly situated - not enough sun - and so I’ve prepped a new space over by the chicken coop and the apple tree. I’m going to have Tom build me a long, narrow raised bed, and then I’ll fill it with not-quite-finished compost from the pile in the chicken coop. I’ll let it sit until the asparagus crowns arrive, and by then it should be ready and fluffy. Asparagus needs a rich, loose, well-drained soil. I’m hoping this new bed will work well.

Shelling Peas

I’ve been working on my plan for next year. It’s a good time to do this, because the summer successes and failures are still fresh in my mind, and with everything planted out for winter, I can see where best to place the 2019 crops. I use a drawing on graph paper, and work it all out there. I’ve decided not to plant melons or corn next summer - we just don’t have room. Trying to get crop rotations perfected also makes things a little difficult.

Sorrel

I’ve also been thinking quite a lot about what I want the goal for next year’s garden to be. As you know, we pick a new goal with every new year. 2018 was the year of soil; I wanted to do things that improved it, and I think we’ve succeeded (more on that subject near the end of the year). But what about next year? It’s important to have that in mind, or else I get burned out and lose sight of the big picture.

Gulf Frittilary caterpillars on the passionvine

I’m also trying to figure out what to do with my recent college education. It’s become clear to me that though I am a complete plant nerd, it’s the cycle of things that really excites me. The systems. The way everything fits together. It wouldn’t be a delightful garden without insects, for instance. And the produce wouldn’t be as abundant and delicious without all the soil life. These things are all connected, and I want to study that. That’s Ecology, and every job I look at in this field requires a degree in Environmental Science or Ecology or Restoration, and I can’t get that where I am right now. So I have some decisions to make.

Fava beans

With the cooler nights, I’m feeling like cooking more substantial meals. It’s time to start making braises, and stews, and bean soup. I have also been making gratins - layered, thinly sliced vegetables with a garlic-infused cream sauce, and a dusting of gruyere. I’ve discovered that it’s possible to make almost any kind of gratin. Our latest involved butternut squash, potatoes, and Lacinato (dinosaur) kale. Use a mandolin for slicing (or if using greens, just tear them into pieces), simmer the cream with minced garlic, use plenty of pepper and salt, and don’t forget to butter the casserole dish. Use 2-3 lbs of veg to 2 cups cream. Some sort of sharp hard cheese grated on top, maybe 1/2 a cup. Bake at 350 for an hour and a half. Delicious, warming, and filling. Good for lunch the next day, too.

a gorgeous potato leaf

Tomorrow, I will give the carved pumpkins to the chickens, after cleaning out any spilled candle wax. They will absolutely love them and peck at them until they are gone, and all the vitamin A in the squash will give the eggs (scarce though they may be at this time of year) a lovely orange yolk.

And oh yeah, the great autumn leaf collection has begun. I do not collect the ones that fall on my garden (though sometimes I move them around a bit), but the ones that fall in the street or driveway get moved into the chicken run, or the compost pile, or the pathways between veg beds. It’s always a lot of sweeping, and I’m thinking of eating my words and buying a leaf blower, albeit an electric one. I hate them. But it might save my hands some aching. (We all have to make concessions as we get older, right? At least that’s what I keep telling myself. Better to garden longer, no matter how much I have to compromise on the noise factor.) If you have one that you like, please pass along recommendations.

a plum leaf

What’s happening in your garden? I’d love to hear all about it.

Happy November!

Tell the Story

A dear friend and I have been having an ongoing text conversation, mostly about the fact that we are both depressed at the future humanity faces right now. We both have moments where we want to pull the covers over our heads, stop reading the news, and forget that the climate crisis is happening. On other days, we both feel empowered and active and ready to face the challenge head-on. It’s kind of a weird thing, feeling both ways at once. We both have children with learning differences, and we’re honestly already exhausted by the daily energy required to be an advocate for someone whom you feel equal parts worry and love. This exhaustion also means we’re highly sensitive people, which can be a double-edged sword; our compassion is enormous, but we also tend to shut down when faced with yet another need, even a simple one. So this desire to either block out problems, or work feverishly to fix them (nothing in between), is something we are constantly encouraging each other to overcome. Instead, we are always reminding ourselves to be fully present. To be aware. To simply feel. Just…. to be.

Which is why, when I saw this post on Patreon, from the Parents for the Planet collective (no author listed), I had to share a bit of it with my friend. It’s titled ‘Don’t Give Up, Your Presence is Required,’ and the author really spelled it out for me - giving me an idea of what my steps forward need to be, especially regarding my children. It’s worth reading the whole thing and I suggest you do that, but here is the part that caused me to stop short:

“Somewhere in your future, there will be survivors. We don't know exactly what journeys or difficult times or problems they will face. They may be related to you only through the stories you tell, not the DNA you share. But they are still your descendants. 

They will exist because you survive these times, these journeys, these problems. You are important because you are their living link to this moment. You are the one who remembers things they might never see, who has tasted things they might never taste, who has touched things they might never touch. We don't know which things will still be there. So we have to be incredibly present to all these moments, in case they are the ones we will need to tell stories about.

Eat the peach. Savor the sweet of it, the feel of the juice, the beautiful complex ombre color of the skin. Save that story for them.

Take the walk. Notice the trees, the smell of the leaves, the sound of the birds. Save that story for them.

Get outside in the snow. Hear the crunch of it under your feet. Notice the flakes on your mittens. Feel it on your face. Save that story too.

You are important because you are the witness to this difficult moment, you are balanced on the cusp of this terrible tipping point. And you are also witness to all the beauty and wonder and awe that's still here, in this moment.

Your descendants require your presence.”

I do not look at nature the same way after reading this essay. I find myself thinking about the fact that what I’m looking at might not be here in 20 years, and how important it is to be totally present and experience it and remember it. Not just for me, but for the people who will come after me.

I think this idea has helped me. I feel like I’ve been given a job - but not to fix anything or figure it out all by myself, and nothing so big that it makes me want to put my head under the covers and block it out. My job, right now, is simply to be present in this moment. To enjoy, and notice, everything around me. To firmly tuck it away in my memory. This job I can do. One might even call it a mission.

So today, Tom and I watched three Nuttall’s Woodpeckers in the Japanese pine tree and marveled at the sounds they were making, and the way they were flirting. Or was it fighting? The other day, in the same tree, a Cooper’s Hawk was hunting the little songbirds and causing a great commotion; it was stunning to watch the melee. Then there is one squirrel who has become so accustomed to us that it just pauses and looks at us, Valley Oak acorn in its mouth, before continuing off right in front of us to go bury it in the hop planters or in my newly-seeded herb bed. I can’t bring myself to shoo him off anymore. Instead I talk to him and say hello and tell him what a fine acorn he found.

I realize there is hard work ahead. And fear. And days when I’ll want to go back to bed and forget everything. But I’m hoping that this new ‘job’ or ‘mission’ (attitude?) will help me even it all out a bit, and stay calm.

Say Hello to my Leetle Friend

I forgot to mention that we spent some time messing about in the honeybee hive last weekend, cleaning up some comb and making sure everything was ok. We took out two full bars of honey for ourselves, still leaving plenty for the bees this winter. We also installed a mite-away strip, a sort of pad that looks like a large feminine hygiene product, filled with formic acid (found in ants). This was to kill off any varroa mite that might be hanging about in the hive. It’s an organic product that we use occasionally for this purpose. For more information about this product and my opinion on treating mites, you can find my 2016 blog post about that here.

Anyway, I went back in the hive yesterday to remove the strip, and came across the spider above, making a very good living in the back of the hive (the unused portion), catching bees that were sneaking out of our not-very-tight seal with the follow board. I removed her, and another spider also enjoying the bee feast, and put them in the leaf litter nearby. Then I made sure our follow board was good and tight against the bars, to keep those bees safe and warm. Hopefully the spiders will now stay out of there.

I like spiders, I’m a fan of what they do for the ecosystem, but I CERTAINLY DO NOT LIKE coming across them by surprise!

The spider at the top of this blog is, I think, a false black widow (Steatoda grossa). They are very common here in California and are extremely non-aggressive (I poked at her a bit in order to take her photo and she was as calm as can be). I wanted to show it to you because it is often falsely identified as a black widow. Of course black widows have a very poisonous bite, but the false ones do not, so there is no need to be afraid of them. Though as you would expect, I don’t think you should be afraid of the poisonous black widows, either, but I realize that most people are. I am not afraid of them, but I’ve definitely been known to squeak a bit when I see them. No, I do not scream. Yelp, maybe. Ok, maybe they scare me a little…

The other spider is a common wolf spider, I believe - harmless to humans unless continually provoked, and even then the bite is mild. They do not spin webs but hunt on the move.

We have had so many mantids in our garden this year, and it’s been a lot of fun to watch them. They are also helpful predators, albeit non-selective ones; they feed on all the prey we have flying around regardless of whether ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ They don’t discriminate. They have amazing eyes and an amazing sense of sight. Above is a mantid egg case, tucked in on the passion vine trellis. Clearly its mother decided that this was a good location to have babies. I’ll keep a close eye on it, and hopefully catch them hatching and share that with you.

Meanwhile, the Gulf Fritillary caterpillars are starting to pupate, and I’m finding them hanging all over - on passion vine tendrils, on the trellis holding them, and as above, on an irrigation pipe which is tied to the trellis. I can’t wait to watch this process unfold. Hopefully they won’t hatch until spring, but I guess if the weather stays warm during the day, they might hatch earlier.

Finally, I found this enormous black fly looking and acting like a carpenter bee on the zinnias. After spending some time researching, I’ve decided it is a Mexican Cactus Fly (Copestylum mexicanum), a type of Syrphid fly. These lay their eggs in rotting cacti, and we do have some cactus around here in various home gardens. However the adults eat nectar, which clearly this one was. Isn’t it cool looking? At times, it had a metallic blue sheen and I thought it quite beautiful. (My bug prof, imminently patient with me even though I am no longer his student, just emailed me that I was correct in my ID.)

I must say it’s hard to get my homework done when I can just zip out to the garden and look at bugs. A constant and very interesting distraction! Soon it’ll be so cold that all of these insects will stay tucked away, so it’s good to appreciate them while we can.

Ramble On

This time of year puts me in mind of songs about autumn - this morning, for some reason, the old Led Zeppelin tune ‘Ramble On.’ Lyrics like ‘Now it’s time for me to go, the autumn moon lights my way’ just seem to fit the mood of the garden.

the cold nights are taking their toll on the basil

Wandering around the yard, I see such interesting things, signs of change. The gall wasp population exploded this year on our Valley Oak (Quercus lobata), and now that the galls have served their purpose, they are falling from the leaves like rain. When you stand under it, you are in a shower of galls. Our driveway is red with them.

The chickens have mostly stopped laying for the winter - between the annual molt and the shortening days, we are lucky to get an egg every once in awhile.

The garlic is sprouting, the kale and cauliflower and lettuce are growing beautifully, but something has eaten all of the kohlrabi and beets, and my spinach won’t germinate. I’ll just keep seeding and planting on through, until frost.

Fall flowers are still blooming like crazy and the pollinators are frantically bringing in all they can - you can feel the urgency. I noticed the honeybees bringing in bright orange pollen and wondered where it was coming from, and then I saw one collecting pollen from a Tithonia blossom and realized that was the source.

this is a hoverfly, though

my little friend

another hoverfly, this time on the Eryngium

We’ve been eating a good fig crop, and the olives are starting to change color. We won’t harvest them till December or January.

‘Panache’ fig

‘Arbequina’ olive

We have a month or two yet before the flowers succumb to cold weather (our days are still in the 80’s, and we’ve only reached nighttime lows in the 40’s a couple of times; our first average frost date is December 15).

Hollyhocks giving some gorgeous last blooms

Thai basil

Leonotis getting ready to bloom

I spend a good amount of time grooming the brassica leaves, picking off cabbage butterfly worms and eggs. It’s not fun, but it’s satisfying, and the chickens love to eat the worms. They do quite a bit of damage to the leaves of all my cruciferous crops, but the cabbage is looking the worst right now, and I’m hoping it pulls through. The row covers help, but do not entirely deter critters (see earlier note about ravaged kohlrabi and beets). Soon I will begin the daily task of raking leaves and adding them to the chicken run. We are desperate for rain, but none is forthcoming.

White bean, pancetta, and chard pot pie, a sure sign of fall. You can find the recipe at Smitten Kitchen.

A reminder: It pays to be a messy gardener this time of year; many pollinators and other insects overwinter in leaf litter and mulch. So rake up some leaves for your compost (or chickens), but leave a good amount where they fall, to help keep a healthy habitat for those little guys.

What does your garden look? Have you had snow where you live?

Salt Fat Acid Heat

This author (and chef) is a local celebrity, as she lives near here in Berkeley. I first heard of her when she got involved with Michael Pollan’s books and movies, but she recently published a book of her own. I held off on getting it, I’m not sure why, but now it’s on order and coming soon. I’m anxious to read it.

Meanwhile, this book was made in to a Netflix series which we have begun watching. It’s FABULOUS. Start with the ‘Fat’ episode, and see if you don’t fall in love with this sort of cooking. My mouth waters just thinking about it. HERE is the website where you can get recipes, buy the book, and learn more about the series. Enjoy!