In the last post I mentioned that Gail and I just picked more vegetables for the East Bay Food Pantry. It’s no accident that we still have veg to pick. Back in the middle of September we took a little gamble and seeded down a big quilt of lettuce, rows of super-sweet and tiny early Napoli carrots, spinach, and Scarlet Queen Red Stems salad turnips (meant to be eaten raw!) It was late to be seeding but we also put row covers over the lettuce and spinach just in case, and the gamble (more of time than money since seeds are cheap) paid off big time. Given that the weather has been so mild with no real killing frost yet, we wouldn’t have even needed the row covers – uncovered lettuce in the raised beds is fine. When we cleaned out the vegetable garden in October we also left other tough-as-nails cool crops standing, like kale and Swiss chard. What’s truly surprising to me is how surprised the folks were to receive more fresh veg now, this close to winter. Granted, this is the first time we’ve made an effort to grow vegetables past summer but is it truly unusual to take advantage of fall?

I’m no vegetable gardener but that might have to change. Spending that hour or two harvesting at the end of November was like a little revelation. This is doable. And especially this time of year, when fresh veg tastes like a luxury (if you could see the crowds of people at Bristol’s new winter farmer’s market grinning over the gorgeous clubs of Brussels’s sprouts, bales of lettuce, carrots and enormous sweet potatoes you’d think none of us had ever had eaten well past August) a little extra effort at the end of summer – even if it’s a gamble – seems more than worthwhile.

This harvest has inspired Gail and me to make a resolution (a little early for New Year’s but what the hey) to get back out in the vegetable bed in March to at least seed down peas and greens in the raised beds under row covers. And who knows, maybe next year we’ll shoot for a four season vegetable garden à la Elliot Coleman.

Are you still eating from your garden?

Fall is dragging its feet getting into winter and although some people and plants I know are ready for it to be cold, it couldn’t be a sweeter treat for us gardeners. We’ve been braced for bitter winds and flurries ever since the first frost (which came with bitter winds and flurries) but have been able to leave our coats on hooks and mittens in pockets for weeks now. These last few days especially have been weirdly warm but so perfect for taking in the last of the fall color seemingly stuck in a holding pattern, and catching up on outside work. Gail and I spent most of today picking more veg for the food pantry (lettuce, carrots, spinach, kale and more!) and spent yesterday in the Display Garden tidying up fallen seed heads. We still can’t quite do the final cutback: some of the plants, like nicotiana and a few salvias, haven’t quit blooming yet; others like yarrow and calendula have started up all over again.

The bees are still out foraging and there are great clots of milkweed bugs on the crispy milkweed seedpods (can they still eat the dead tissue or are they just … busy?) and they’re even on nicotiana leaves. Every year we have to look these guys up to see if they’re good, bad or indifferent. They do eat milkweed pods – and maybe nicotiana leaves? – and because of that they themselves are as safe as Monarchs from predation. (Any bird silly enough to eat one will get the throw-ups.) But we only remember spotting them at the end of the season and they don’t seem to do a lot of damage. So we left them and their plants be. The bugs pictured are adults; as instars they are smaller, shiny bright orange-red and wingless. (As always, click the pic to enlarge.)

Despite the bonus of unfrozen days, some creatures don’t seem to be finding what they need to survive winter (if it ever gets here.) Have you noticed an absence of acorns this year? We know that oaks put out extra acorns now and again as a way of insuring that some of them survive to become trees, and Gail and I remember last year as a big acorn year. This year the trees rested apparently and the squirrels are frantic. Good thing we planted tulips… If anyone has a good squirrel pilfer prevention technique to share, please do!

Are you enjoying a few extra days of mild weather too – or do you just think it’s too weird and time for a change?

After Tropical Storm Irene stripped the color from so many trees around here back in August I was pretty pessimistically convinced that fall color would be lousy this year. And maybe that’s why it has seemed especially spectacular. There’s less of it to be sure, and it was more sudden and fast passing than usual (maybe because there’s less of it) but the reds seem deeper and the yellows and oranges more intensely glow-y.

New England fall is a gift. The leaves from our deciduous forests and gardens, colorful or not, are a huge bonus. I still can’t believe anyone would bag them up as garbage. I love the look of freshly fallen leaves carpeting the ground, and the renewable resource dust-to-dust cycle of nature really appeals to my inner lazy gardener. But of course there’s nothing lazy about leaving the leaves. Almost all of us who keep them from the landfill, at least pick them up and put them back down someplace else. It’s how we participate in the cycle.

At home I rake what few leaves fall in my yard straight into my garden beds. This gives critters like spiders, bumblebees and butterflies a place to overwinter. The plants don’t mind and aren’t smothered. (No oaks leaves fall in my yard – they have more of a tendency than any other to form an impenetrable mat.) Come spring, all I need to do is make sure the crowns of plants peek out. Other gardeners also rake extra leaves into piles. Gail says that by spring her pile of whole leaves is as soft and half decomposed as if it had been shredded – perfect for mulching her beds with. Still others mow the leaves. Leaves left in a thin enough layer that the grass still shows will provide nutrients for a healthier lawn. If the clippings are bagged, they may be used as nitrogen-rich mulch in the garden.

Here we do a bit of all three. Fred and Dan make a first pass over the property with mowers and graciously dump the clippings in the vegetable bed. They also blow the leaves off of the lawns and vacuum them up truckload by truckload. This year we realized that the vacuum did a good enough job of shredding the leaves that we saved several days and gallons of gas not passing them through the leaf shredder. The pile has already settled quite a bit and Gail and I have mulched all of the Display Garden beds to save weeding them later.

I know I ask this every year, but please refresh my memory – what do you do with your leaves?

(click on pictures for larger view)

It’s almost 70 degrees outside, the air is feather-soft, the sky is blue-blue and the sun has that golden, get-under-your-eyelids slant. It’s the kind of day that absolutely insists that we get outside. We should be looking for fall color and reindeer moss, or sitting back against a warm wall with our eyes closed, or propping up fallen seedheads…

I had to look up Indian summer to see if this would officially qualify and it must. The definitions say that it’s that spell of warm weather after frost and right before the ground freezes solid and snow covers everything. It’s also the thaw that comes later in the winter – January or February – that feels so much like spring. Perfect time for an Indian raid evidently, which explains the name. According to Wikipedia, other countries call it things like “Old Ladies’ Summer”, “Little summer of the quince”, “Golden October”; and “a tiger in autumn”. (I have to say, I like those names better.)

We’ve had frost – we even had a dusting of snow – but it hasn’t been cold enough to do absolutely everything in (maybe because of this Old Ladies’ summer we’re having.) It’s been interesting to note the survivors particularly among the annuals. The lettuce in the raised bed is perky as ever; borage is fine and so is most of the nicotiana, agastache, and the salvias. What Dahlias were left in the ground went not in the snow surprisingly, but over a cold night a couple of days after that. Unfortunately we had to take most of the other annuals out – particularly in the cutting garden and North Garden – and I would have liked to see which were the ones made of tougher stuff. Some of my neighbors still have zinnias blooming… What annuals survive the first frosts in your garden?

I hope you’re outside right now (if you’re having this perfectly lovely Indian summer too) taking the opportunity to futz in the garden, lie back in the chaise, or collect bouquets of leaves. Come to think of it, what the heck am I doing still sitting in front of this comput—

There has been a lot of speculation ever since Irene blew through that this wouldn’t be a good fall foliage year. Even in the days after the storm the horizon – particularly anything facing south and east – has looked markedly brownish. And then we had our unseasonably freakish snow storm (little more than a dusting here but still…) and it’s easy to just give up and think winter’s here. But we’ve had lots of  days of lovely fall weather interspersed among the ugly days (we’re enjoying a blissful spell right now) and there is plenty of fall color. Pockets of it. We just have to look a little closer.

Despite the freakishly unseasonable weather that might make us think it’s too late to plant bulbs, it absolutely isn’t. We were able to stay right on schedule – this sunny and warm post-nor’easter week is a bulb planter’s dream. We were able to wait until frost (erm… snow) to take out the last of our annuals and dahlias – amazingly some still haven’t been fully hit despite cold nights. But out they came to make way for bulbs. The Deadheads planted over 1000 tulips and alliums in the cutting garden and other display garden beds on Tuesday; Over 300 more in the North Garden that same day; and this morning the Rockettes planted 1800 little bulbs in the Rose Garden (Chionodoxa, Puschkinia, Fritillaria, Anemone…) Tomorrow the Florabundas will finish up planting something like 400 more tulips and alliums in the Rose Garden. No matter how weird the weather is this coming spring we can look forward to (amazing) pockets of color then too.

This marks the last official work-week in the gardens for the garden volunteers (they still have the big Christmas tree to decorate) and our intern Tara who saw us through a full growing season. Gail and I will really miss everyone’s smiles, good-natured growls (Toni), hard work, stories, dedication and easy company. Come by for tea any time!

Are you finding – or planting – pockets of color too?