A change in the weather

When Stephen told me this morning that there would be frost tonight, I knew that my day was not going to go as planned.

While many of the plants, the zucchini, cucumbers, peas, beans, patty pan and acorn squash, have come to their natural end, there is still an enormous amount of produce in the garden. The squash succumbed to some sort of fungus while I was in California a couple of weeks ago. Stephen tells me that he wants to host a control burn on production side of the garden to get rid of it. (A third of the garden is a wonderful layout of rectangular and triangular raised beds with a diamond bed in the middle; the other 2/3 is an open space.)

While he thinks that we shouldn’t plant anything that we planted this year in that space next year, goodness me, that’s a lot, I think the fungus was due to the fact that he didn’t want to disturb the earthworms this spring, and planted through the decaying newspapers and hay that kept last year’s weeds in check.

He can burn the spent garden if he likes, but I think the act of tilling and adding compost and manure before the ground freezes will be more than remedy enough. He tells me that he can burn around the two artichoke plants that will need to gently freeze over before producing fruit next year. The newspaper’s editor, who also has a gardening business, had figured that he can trick the artichoke plants into thinking they has been through a frost by exposing them to the March weather here in the Northeast. While some that he handed around the office in May produced an artichoke or two, my two plants are lush vegetation with no fruit. Perhaps, if we mulch heavily, the plants will grow again and produce fruit.

I read that you can cut pepper plants way back and mulch them to get a second year of growth. Stephen’s son Matt, an organic farmer, says that wintering peppers over is only for temperate climes. But with one half of a huge round bale of hay left over, I’m thinking we can pile it on real thick.

“What have we got to lose,” Stephen and I said to each other this evening as we covered the pepper plants with sheets to get them through the night.

Garden and harvesting tasks consumed my afternoon; first picking ripe tomatoes for dying, then harvesting the acorn squash, cutting zinnias before the frost, picking the largest of the peppers, and basil and parsley to pack with the dried tomatoes.

The purple fingerling potato plant grew amidst the tomatoes this year, a volunteer from a potato left behind, I believe, two years ago. As I harvested what is probably about five pounds of potatoes, I hoped that there was at least one that I was leaving behind. We had purchased the fingerlings at a food market in Florida, while visiting Stephen’s daughter Theresa a couple of years back. As I remember, they were not very productive and Matt said that the production from commercially grown food was always less than seed stock. Although this plant certainly produced more that my seed stock potatoes in the other garden.

The dehydrator has been running all day and as I was cutting up the newly dried tomatoes I remembered a year, more than a decade ago, when I tried to dry tomatoes in the attic. Some days of rain made them all mold. So despite feeling a bit disjointed with all of the garden tasks today, there was an overwhelming sense of accomplishment that has taken years in the making.

Sharon Lovich, a dharma teacher at the nearby Kadampa Buddhist Center who spoke at the Upper Delaware Unitarian Universalist Fellowship two weeks ago, said that in Buddhist thinking life is a continuum and there are no beginnings or end.

On several occasions throughout the day, on my numerous trips to the garden, I had a sense of being connected to myself at a different point in time, revisiting, redoing, finally making good, perhaps, on all of my intentions to live in harmony with myself, whatever the weather may bring.