Goodnight, Garden
In Autumn, my love affair with the garden cools. I was smitten in March when tender seedlings stole my heart, demanding 12 hours of grow-light, a tiny bit of fish emulsion, a sweep of the hand to strengthen their fragile stems. The romance grew tempestuous with the heat of summer producing offspring of every color: lush red tomatoes, cool green cucumbers, burgundy eggplant, a rainbow of peppers.
As the days shorten, my garden and I enter our Golden Years, comfortable with each other. Shriveling cucumber vines reveal a few large blimps hidden until now. Yellowed tomato stalks hold tight to green globes which might ripen in my garage by Thanksgiving, wrapped tightly in newspaper. Tropical eggplant and peppers, disliking cool nights have shuddered and stopped growing. I have been known to cover remaining vegetables at the prediction of frost--a forest of sheeted ghosts in my backyard as if waiting for Halloween.
Yet some of my children thrive in autumn. Kale, broccoli, carrots, parsnips, turnips—all grow sweeter with the cold. I have learned to slip kale into soups and stir fries without anyone (my husband Lou) even noticing. Broccoli plants (PacMan variety) have each yielded one large head, but continue to produce tender florets beyond the frost and even into snow season. I pull carrots and onions until the ground freezes and sometimes leave a few to be discovered as little jewels under mulch in the spring. My second growth of lettuce, seeded in late summer, now yields a variety of green, red and bronze leaves.
All summer I have enjoyed the blue-green foliage of leeks, their spears reminding me of spring iris. Now they can be pulled for potato-leek soup on the first somber grey day. “This is a soup-day,” Lou will proclaim. Though I must visit the farmers’ market for ingredients not grown in my garden, our favorite is “root soup,” invented by our son Mark, combining every root in sight and a few more.
In August I pickled beets and cucumbers, canned salsa, froze pasta sauce. (See summer issue of Edible Twin Cities.) As tomatoes continue ripening in fall, I quarter them and throw them in the freezer, but this year I will experiment with roasting and drying. It may be time to purchase a dehydrator. Red peppers can also be roasted and placed in freezer bags. The cooler kitchen of September and October restores my ambition for canning, roasting, drying, and freezing.
Unless you have spent the past year under a bushel basket, you are aware of the current push to “eat local.” What better way to join the movement than to preserve a portion of your garden for the long winter. In addition to using your own produce, look for the green “L” on produce at your Twin Cities food co-op signifying that the item was grown in Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota or Iowa. Visiting the farmers’ markets well into the fall, you can pick up a squash for the famous Parisien squash menu. (See recipes.) Remember that pumpkins are good for more than jack-o-lanterns and can be roasted for pies and soups. My garden can’t make room for these viney creatures, but farmers’ markets supplement my own harvest.
Most of us city dwellers no longer have the luxury of a root cellar, that magical storage place with low temperature and high humidity, but if you have a cool corner in your basement, or a not too cold corner in your garage, you might try overwintering some roots. Onions need to be cured by drying in the sun a couple of weeks before storing. Carrots can be buried in sand to preserve crunch. Winter squash are not very fussy and do quite well in my cool basement.
Putting the garden to bed is a bitter-sweet process, a little like saying goodnight to a lover. I enjoy cleaning up the messy tangle of vines, stalks, and weeds. Pulling out eggplant roots requires the heft of a weightlifter. Lou helps me tug, slash, and snip until our backyard jungle is reduced to a tidy landscape. It’s good to clean up all debris where disease and pests may lurk. We compost everything that isn’t too woody in our own bin, hauling the stringy stuff to our local compost site. The cleared garden waits for Halloween when Lou traditionally enthrones a jack-o-lantern smack in the center where it grins at us until drooping into a toothless grimace in November.
All summer I keep a journal, recording dates of planting and germination, names of varieties I am bound to forget, a diagram of the garden. In Autumn as I dismantle the tangled mess, I record successes and failures, suggestions for next year, tips I have gathered from experts. It’s important at this time to go over my notes and make sure I can decipher them in spring. Typical entries: “Plant more Amish Paste tomatoes.” “Move the salad greens to a shadier area.” “Experiment with ‘Black Pearl’ peppers.” “Try growing cucumbers on a trellis.” And the following year: “Cucumbers don’t train well. Abandon trellis!” Each year is a new beginning, a chance to plan the best garden ever.
My parting advice: Rake your leaves in rows and run the mulching mower over them saving them for next year’s mulch. We pile them behind our shed. Home grown leaves make the best (and cheapest!) mulch ever, smothering weeds and preserving moisture. I like the part about not bagging them and hauling to the compost site. You might want to cover the pile with a tarp to keep the rain and snow off. If you don’t have a hidden corner like ours, bag the leaves and place the bags around the foundation of your house for insulation.
My love affair with the garden is not quite over in autumn, just cooling until that first seed catalogue arrives around December 1, rekindling the flame. There will be no divorce.
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