Preparing for Winter....when it comes

honeybee on California poppy flower 

This past weekend and into this week, Tom and I have been cleaning up our place, preparing for winter. Winter seems to be tarrying elsewhere, though. Yesterday I stopped by a local antique shop and while paying for my purchases, asked the owner if it seemed unseasonably warm here. She told me yes, that the area usually gets its first snow in October. However, last winter, our first here, we didn't get snow until December, if I remember correctly.  The U.S. climate data website supports my memory. In November of last year, the highest temperature in November was on the second of the month, with a high near 74°F, while highs the rest of the month varied between 66°F and 42°F, with lows between 45°F and 7°F. Well, we've had a balmy fall, with highs in the 60s and 70s almost every day, giving us a great opportunity to work outside.

Tom cleaned out the greenhouse this past weekend, pulling out tomato and pepper plants and replacing them with onion plants. We have a lot of onions in the outside garden, so we'll see how well the onions outside survive the winter as compared to those inside the greenhouse. 

Tomato plants stacked up in front of the greenhouse, Tom and Cassie on the right

greenhouse cleared of tomatoes and peppers

onions, radishes, greens, cabbage still growing in the garden

Tom also affixed a rain gutter to the greenhouse and used plastic gutter material to direct precipitation into the greenhouse.

gutter added to the greenhouse, with downspout for directing precipitation inside

drainage gutters for directing precipitation in the greenhouse

I finally turned to a project that I had procrastinated on because it was a little overwhelming, repairing the gravel walkway in our backyard which the previous owners' dogs had torn up. To do this, I would be tackling two projects at once, adding to the walkway the gravel I'm removing from an area where we plan to put in an herb garden. Photos might describe these projects best.

The area where we plan an herb garden: I am removing gravel and the underlying plastic.

I'm recyling the plastic ground cover and gravel to cover bare areas in this gravel walkway.

Here is the area repaired, with gravel covering the plastic.

When I get all the plastic ground cover and gravel removed from the area where we are planning an herb garden, Tom will dig up the ground (I've asked for his assistance in this), and then we will put in walkways and separate raised beds. I hope we can get this done in time for spring planting. 

Another project I'm working on this week is repairing the rock "creek" that was part of the original landscaping of a previous owner. The "creek" was neglected and filled with debris.

The rock "creek" that had been neglected (photo taken in March)

Dirt, gravel, and other debris had filled in the rock "creek" bed.

This week, I cleared out the debris and uncovered buried rocks in the "rock creek."

Tom said yesterday that I was going to get the yard all in order in time for us to move again. "Well," I replied, "that would be par for the course." The 2016 presidential election has already impacted some of our hopes for the future. I just hope that the fallout will not be as bad as we imagine.

scrub jay at my makeshift bird feeder--some flowers still blooming in mid-November

The Fall Garden in Arizona

path to the garden of Casa Malpollos, decorated with fall leaves from the peach trees

Tonight's low will approach 32°, but the rest of the week the lows will be in the 40s, so our cool-weather loving garden plants should be fine. We've had a string of clear, pleasantly cool days, and today was no exception. The cats and I wandered out to the garden around 8:30 this morning, where Cassie browsed on some grass, and I plucked and munched on a few Sungold tomatoes and some mixed mustard greens. If we don't have any hard freezes for a while, we may be able to harvest some Crimson Crunch radishes though I planted the seed a little late (on September 11th) for our altitude and something gnawed them down to the ground not long after they sprouted. They are recovering, and the tiny radishes are fleshing out. That same day, I planted Italian Arugula, Runway Arugula, Wine Country Mesclun and Ruby & Emerald Streaks Mustard. Arugula sprouted in mid-to-late August near my weed compost pile (veggie remains go in a separate compost pile that I will dig into the garden after they have composted). I must have scattered some seed there from my early spring arugula, so next year I should plant these seeds in mid-to-late August for an early fall crop. 

Clicking on the links in the paragraph above will take you to descriptions of those greens and veggies at Renee's Garden. I have been ordering garden and flower seeds from Renee's since the mid-nineties when Renee's was Shepherd's Garden Seeds. White Flower Farm bought Shepherd's Garden Seeds, and for a time, Renee Shepherd worked for the company that bought out her business. For some years now, however, she has returned to selling product through her own company.  The price of the seeds may be a little more than the packets you might get off a Home Depot carousel, but I have never been dissatisfied with my orders, and I love the artwork on the seed packets, too. I re-purpose the packets after planting the seeds.

Re-purposed seed packets from Renee's Garden--just right for tiny gifts or a special note

After Cassie and Persey did their rounds in the garden, sniffing plants and looking for insects to catch (Cassie brought a grasshopper in the house yesterday), I watered the purple cabbage that Tom planted. We haven't had any rain for days; the monsoon season is past.

Persey sniffing in the garden; squash going to seed; more green onions than we can eat

purple cabbage and green onions

Emerald Streaks Mustard, mesclun mix, and arugula

Crimson Crunch radishes, recovering from being gnawed by some nefarious garden muncher

Outside the garden, native flower plants are going to seed. I enjoy pinching the dry seed heads of the cowpen daisy that came up volunteer in our back yard and watching the seed spread in the wind. Birds will eat some, and our chickens, which we often let out of their pen in the evenings, will peck up some of the seed, too, but I'm hoping to get a beautiful, bright crop in the 2017 monsoon season. And those wildflowers I planted are doing really well on the northeast side of the house. 

That's a lovely thing about fall: being in the moment, enjoying the last of the produce, and yet looking forward to making improvements to next year's garden.

climbing nasturtiums on the door to the Secret Garden room

fall leaves in the Secret Garden room

morning glories still blooming though a little wilted because I've not been watering them

Distraction #3, Gardening and Canning: How I've kept from getting too depressed during the 2016 Presidential Campaign

Cassie at the greenhouse door

I should have noted in the past two posts that these techniques to avoid depression during a more-than-usually contentious presidential campaign are ones that work for me; other people will have their own ways of coping. What I'm promoting here is the need to step away from the 24-hour news cycle, whether one accesses it on the Internet or cable television, to maintain one's equilibrium during these divisive times. I am also referring to depression as a general feeling of powerlessness and sadness in response to the focus on hatefulness in the news. Do we really need another conspiracy theory to rile up a mob of voters? Can we stand another video of so-called patriots screaming "Lock her up," suggesting that it's a good idea to prosecute one's political opponents? 

Those of us committed to facts, logic, and spirited but thoughtful and respectful debate have been bombarded with headlines throughout this campaign season that suggest our commitment is a delusion. Sometimes I think that if I hear or read one more "opinion" with no supporting evidence, I'll scream. But then I head to the garden to gather produce or just to look at the plants still surviving here in late fall. Fortunately, the presidential campaign will be over by winter and the first snow.

I find solace in a garden. Part of that comes from the heavy work early in the season; nothing quite pulls one's focus away from a spiral of worries than good, physical labor. Then there is the magic of germination; I never fail to be surprised every year as those hard, tiny seeds I planted break apart and push that first bit of green above the soil. Plucking the spring greens or gathering the first tomato is occasion for celebration. Who can be sad in a garden?

Our first full summer of gardening in Arizona brought us more bounty than we expected. Since Tom re-purposed an old chicken house into a greenhouse in which we planted tomatoes and peppers, our tomatoes there were turning ripe long before those in the larger, open garden. And we still have tomatoes blooming and producing here in mid-October, Sungolds in the outside garden, Celebrities, Sungolds, and even Black Krim in the greenhouse.

I have described in earlier posts some of our Arizona gardening experiences--here, here, here, and here--so there is no need to reprise those. We ate well from our garden this year, and then we began canning our produce for later consumption, learning as we went. 

preparing to make and can apple chutney

Tom started first on the tomatoes; he canned a total of about 53 pints. Then we began canning the apples from our apple trees; we had so many that we shared boxes of apples with neighbors. I first tried an apple chutney recipe. Tom began with apple sauce and then apple jam, discovering after the first batch of jam that we should pulse the apple pieces in a food processor for a prettier jam. With apple slices, apple jam, apple chutney, apple sauce, Red Hot apple jelly, and apple-serrano-pepper jelly, we have enough canned apple products to share over and over again.

canned apple slices

apple jam

draining apple juice for jelly

apple-serrano pepper jelly

When the first snows manage to get above the mountains and  settle into the dryer Round Valley, we will still be eating tomatoes from our garden, in soups and salsas; spreading jam and jelly from our apples on our morning toast; making apple pie from apple slices we canned; topping our ice cream with apple sauce and adding the sauce to recipes for muffins and pancakes. When the 44th President of the United States moves out of the White House and the 45th is sworn in, we will be enjoying the sweetness of our summer garden--and forgetting, I hope, the bitterness of that same summer's presidential campaign.

our summer canning

October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or shutting a book, did not end the tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: 'It is simply a matter,' he explained to April, 'of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.'

--Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol, 4: Season of Mists

Distraction #2, Food and Wine: How to Keep from being Depressed by Today's News

Early summer garden salad, with mesclun mix greens and radishes from our garden

When Tom and I were first married, I did a lot of cooking. We were undergraduates at Texas A&M University, and my dishes then were family comfort food favorites (potato soup; Cowboy Stew), recipes from my grandmothers (Grandma Dugat's Sweet Potato Casserole), recipes exchanged with friends (Fruit Pizza) and recipes I would pick up in a local grocery store (Shrimp Victoria, from the Texas Agricultural Extension Service). This latter dish I made many, many times as I went from being an undergraduate to a graduate student to an instructor at Louisiana State University and beyond. You could gain weight just looking at the (now food-spattered but still clearly legible) recipe: 1 pound raw Texas shrimp, peeled and deveined; 1 cup sour cream; 1/2 cup finely chopped onion; 1/4 cup margarine or butter; 1 can (6 ounces) mushrooms; 1 tablespoon flour; 1/4 teaspoon of salt; dash cayenne pepper; 1 1/2 cups cooked rice. Sauteed, gently cooked, and served over rice, that shrimp dish was for years the fanciest dish I prepared for company (along with Shrimp Couscous).

As the years passed, however, Tom took over a great deal of the cooking. He introduced hand-gathered (by himself and a friend who was Anishinaabe) wild rice for the dishes I learned to cook in Minnesota (wild rice soup; wild rice casserole). He created many variations on veggie stir-fries and Indian curries; lentil and sweet potato soup; tofu, fried with his special spice blend, sauteed with veggies; homemade sushi. I stuck with my old favorites, such as my family recipe of potato soup, modifying it over time: adding sausage and garlic to the simple potato-onion-salt and pepper-liquid (milk and water) recipe; taking out the sausage as two members of the family became vegetarians and adding cheese; carmelizing the onions before adding to the soup; adding homemade vegetable stock to the milk base. 

But this summer I began cooking dinner every evening, looking for ways to prepare fresh vegetables from our Arizona garden. Spending time looking for likely recipes online, bookmarking the best ones, thinking of how to modify them to our tastes or to the ingredients on hand were wonderful distractions from focusing on Internet news that was guaranteed to bring up my blood pressure.

And so, when the veggies started coming in, I found recipes to fit our palate, such as Mexican Pepper Casserole from The Moosewood Cookbook. To the original recipe, I added garlic and one thinly sliced yellow squash.

Mexican Pepper Casserole, recipe from the 2014 version of The Moosewood Cookbook, by Mollie Katzen

While in Phoenix one weekend, we went by Whole Foods, and I bought some fancy packages of jello powder. Some fresh strawberries (with real whipped cream, not Cool Whip) made a nice touch for dessert with the casserole above:

Strawberry jello with little strawberry hearts

I also baked a tomato pie for the first time, with fresh tomatoes from our garden and a homemade butter pie crust.

Fresh vegetables from our summer garden

My first tomato pie. The butter pie crust shrank a bit and burned at the edges, but...

YUM!

When Tom and I cooked together, I would often make a salad, and he would stir-fry vegetables from the garden; I might put on some squash to steam, sprinkled with dried tarragon. But as the summer progressed and the 2016 Presidential campaign became more heated, you can see how my cooking became a bit more calorie-laden.

I battered our garden-fresh squash in egg, flour and spices--and fried it.

And I set about improving dishes I had tried before and others I hadn't made in a long time. (I used to make apple pie from scratch fairly frequently.)

My second attempt at tomato pie; I achieved a more uniform, less blackened crust. I added a nutty bread crumb and Parmesan cheese topping.

I managed to make one of the prettiest apple pies I had made in a long time, with a double butter crust and apples from our small orchard.

I loaded up fresh vegetable casseroles with various cheeses.

Squash Casserole

A friend suggested that I try to make tomato tarts since we had so many tomatoes from our garden. I experimented first with a few tomatoes and with butter pie crust left over from the apple pie I had made a couple of days previously.

My first experimental tomato tart

I tried a full-sized one next:

My first "real" tomato tart

Last night I made another tomato tart, using a butter pie crust recipe because I didn't have the ingredients for the crust of a fancier recipe I found online.

Rolling out the dough for the pie crust--I added fresh rosemary to the dough.

The final result: perhaps the last tomato tart of the season

Why I now need to get back on the elliptical every day

It took me almost three hours to make that last tomato tart, from gathering the green onions and parsley from the garden to making and rolling out the dough to cutting up the tomatoes and placing them on top of the Grey Poupon, sauteed onion and Serrano peppers, cheese, and fresh herb layers. Cooking from scratch takes a lot of time, time that otherwise might be spent brooding over the news, the days events, all one's past failings....whatever. 

I do, however, caution about the wine: too much, and you're likely to leave that message on a Facebook page that you have long avoided doing. Please be a bit sparing with the liquor in drowning your political angst. Screaming into your pillow may not wake your neighbors, but it's likely to upset your partner, as sympathetic as he may be. 

Another undesired result can be weight gain. Tom and I are going to be eating a lot less cheese-laden casseroles and vegetable pies with butter crusts. I'm looking for simple recipes for canned tomatoes, since Tom canned 53 pints of our summer produce. I just found a cool Gazpacho recipe in The Moosewood Cookbook, just right for winding down after the presidential election, all emotion spent.

Distraction #1, the beautiful natural world: How to Keep from being Depressed by Today's News

Fall color in the White Mountains

This morning I got on the Internet as I do every morning to read the latest news. As too often, the news is troubling. I've learned that as his campaign collapses, Donald Trump reveals himself to be a poor loser: he's commanding his followers to watch their local polls for "certain" people who may commit voter fraud. This, despite that in-person voter fraud is practically non-existent. Our voting process seems more likely to be hacked by Russians, who seem to want Donald Trump to win the election.  I also read that the Trump campaign got a cousin of one of the women who has accused Trump of sexual assault to release a statement accusing the woman of lying "just for attention." This is what happens when women speak openly of sexual assault: they are immediately attacked, not infrequently by friends and relatives who refuse to believe the personal experience for any number of reasons. (#WhyWomenDontReport) And it seems that Donald Trump is looking to set up a television network that will likely be an outlet for his many conspiracy theories as well as for the alt-right crowd, led by Steve Bannon and Breitbart.com. 

And that's a short list of the news that threatened to throw shade on my day.

What do I do when crappy news or unhappy circumstances beckon the black dog? Well, here I begin a series of posts on what brings me joy when circumstances don't.

• Looking at the big picture, which is a lot bigger than we once thought

Here in Apache County, Arizona, the Milky Way is still visible, and to do my part in reducing light pollution, I try to keep our outdoor lights off unless we're planning to return home after dark. In July, we set up a telescope and got a good look at the rings of Saturn. But then I turned my binoculars to the Milky Way and was blown away by the millions of stars that are totally invisible in most parts of the country. It turns out that there are even more galaxies in the "observable" universe than we thought: "Hubble Reveals Observable Universe Contains 10 Times More Galaxies Than Previously Thought." Nothing makes one's worries seem more inconsequential than to put them in perspective of a galaxy or a universe. I like to think that there are other worlds out there where sentient inhabitants are doing a better job at being stewards of their worlds and each other than we are.

If the night sky is overcast, the moon too bright, or the lights of the area too bright, one can always go to the NASA website to look at images taken by the Hubble telescope:  https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/multimedia/index.html

• Paying attention to my own backyard

Immersing oneself in the details can also help distract one from all the worries in the world.  While living in Abita Springs, Louisiana, I began paying attention to all the tiny creatures that lived in or visited my yard and gardens. There are worlds almost unknown to us a step or two from our back doors, with dramas enacted every day. I have watched tiny predators stalk their prey, and I have identified insects I did not know existed until I started prowling around my yard with a camera. Our yard here in Arizona has plenty to interest me, too. Birds come to the feeders and the birdbath I created out of a stump and a large, shallow bowl I purchased at a thrift store. Occasionally, a skunk will wander nocturnally through the yard, and deer will jump the fence, leaving hoof prints in the muddy ground or bare bark on trees they have rubbed against. Rabbits burrow nests in our greenhouse and under roots of trees. Pollinators visit the flowers, and I am learning to identify bees and wildflowers here in my Arizona yard. 

• Enjoying the changing seasons 

Yesterday Tom and I drove through the mountains while running errands and took a short detour on a national forest road just to look at the aspens in their fall color. A deer crossed the washboard road ahead of us and into a glen covered in golden aspen leaves. We stopped a little later to take photos of a landscape which will be covered in snow in a couple of months. 

Last weekend we hiked a forest trail where we thought we would have a good chance of hearing elk bugling. We were not disappointed. 

Elk cows follow the large-racked male that we got just a glimpse of through the trees.

Since we moved here in March of 2015, we've taken advantage of the beautiful natural areas, hiking on forest trails, along rivers, or up to the top of cinder cones.  Beautiful wildflowers bloom here in the monsoon season, as a hike along the South Fork of the Little Colorado River last summer demonstrated.

Wild bergamot and goldenrod along the South Fork Trail of the Little Colorado River

Coneflowers along the South Fork Trail of the Little Colorado River

more flowers along the South Fork Trail of the Little Colorado River

Nothing lifts the spirits, I think, than being out in nature on a beautiful day--and research seems to prove it. In one study at Stanford University, "volunteers who walked briefly through a lush, green portion of the Stanford campus were more attentive and happier than volunteers who strolled for the same amount of time near heavy traffic." Other studies have shown that walking in green areas can have a measured neurological and physiological effect on people. 

And those days when the weather is not conducive to a walk in the woods, writing about those walks and looking at the beautiful photos I've taken on those walks are pretty good substitutes.