Cooler Days for Gardening

tiny bee on a globe mallow in our front yard

After an out-of-state, nine-day trip, we've almost put away all the stuff we had packed for our travels though the tent that we used in an overnight camping adventure in the Cascade Mountains of Washington still sits crumpled on a chair in our study. When we returned to Arizona, early fall seemed to have arrived. The wildflowers in our yard were blooming prolifically, temperatures hovered in the fifties at night, and with the windows open at night we could hear elk bugling in the nearby mountains. 

Globe mallow, a native plant, growing in our front yard

While we were gone, one of our neighbors picked the ripening vegetables in our garden and the apples that fell from our trees and canned salsa, spaghetti sauce, and apple butter. Tom got busy the first weekend we were home and canned more tomatoes--35 pints total for the season so far. And this week, I have been cleaning up the garden and planting seeds that I hope will have time to germinate, grow, and produce before the first freeze. I should have planted the seeds --two kinds of arugula, a spicy mustard mix, Crimson Crunch radishes, a mesclun mix--mid-August, but I didn't free up any room for fall planting until I dug the potatoes. Then Tom transplanted onions into two of those rows. But when we returned from Washington state, I cleared out the cowpen daisies that were past their bloom, and Tom pulled up a couple of dead tomato plants. Gardening here is an experiment for us, anyway, and we can always blame any failures on our being newcomers and unfamiliar with the climate.

Yesterday I spent all afternoon making salsa from tomatoes, peppers, and cilantro from our garden. I'm a slow worker when it comes to cooking anything more than dinner. I'll chop up some vegetables, take a break and read some headline news on my computer, return to chop up more vegetables, take a break to check on the garden, and return to the work at hand. That's why it took me all afternoon. Also, I simmered the salsa for 75 minutes to get it to the right consistency. 

salsa ingredients from our garden, serrano peppers, tomatoes, bell peppers, cilantro

And after all that work, I got only 6 pints of salsa (we ate one pint already) out of about 12 tomatoes. I am freezer-canning the salsa rather than pressure canning and hope to can some more salsa as tomatoes continue to ripen in our garden and greenhouse.

Salsa simmering on the stove

five little half-pints of salsa for the freezer

This morning I took the cats out for a brief romp in the yard before their second breakfast. (We space out small meals throughout the day; Tom feeds them first around 4 AM.) Taking them out before meals makes it easier to call them inside.

Sunlight and shadow--cats getting their morning yard time

Cassie in the daisy fleabane flowers that haven't opened yet for the day

While the cats sniffed around the yard, I wandered into the garden. The birdhouse gourd vines have covered the back fence, and several large gourds are ripening. Instructions I found online counsel harvesting the gourds after the stems turn brown, then gently washing and storing the gourds in a cool, dry place to cure. The stems of my gourds are still green, and I'm anxious that the gourds be ready to harvest before the first freeze so that they won't rot.

birdhouse gourds

more gourds

It was a beautiful early morning in the garden.

early morning in the garden at Casa Malpollos

Tomato plants escaping from the greenhouse; shadow of a neighbor's shed

A high wind yesterday blew apples from the apple trees

Not having grown apples before, we're not sure when they're ripe for harvesting. Our neighbor Gloria says after the first frost, but she has made apple butter with the ones that have fallen from our trees and says the apples are tart and a little sweet.

Family Heirlooms

garlic drying in our garden shed in Louisiana

Years ago when we lived on 23+ acres of land in Georgia, I grew several heirloom tomatoes for the first time--Cherokee purple, green zebra, among others. The tomatoes were very colorful, and I managed to encourage my two kids into eating them as healthy snacks by slicing the tomatoes and arranging them in a colorful pattern on a white platter. I called the dish "tomato snacks," and the kids often asked for this dish as a midday, summer treat--another example of presentation being everything. 

The beautiful diversity of heirloom tomatoes is one reason to grow them, and I have been growing different heirlooms ever since. They are tastier than most hybrid tomatoes, and they are open-pollinated, so that you can save seed to plant the next year and have true-to-the original descendants of the parent plants. 

There are some possible drawbacks: some heirlooms seem to be more susceptible to various fungal or bacterial wilts or root rot. A couple of our plants this year have succumbed to such a disease. But even hybrids bred to be disease-resistant can have problems. The Better Boy tomatoes that we planted in our greenhouse here have tended to have blossom end rot, a dark, leathery spreading "sore" on the bottom of the tomatoes. The soil in the greenhouse includes chicken manure that accumulated in what was once a chicken house. Perhaps we didn't water the plants sufficiently at just the right time, or perhaps there was a calcium deficiency in the soil, or perhaps we planted those tomatoes too early. Not all the tomatoes from the Better Boy plants have developed blossom end rot, and other tomatoes in the greenhouse seem to be doing very well. But we are noting these problems for next year, as we rotate the tomatoes to other areas of the garden to reduce the chances of those diseases spreading further.

Heirloom vegetables are also interesting because the seeds have been passed down for generations and often have interesting origin stories attached to them. For example, the Mortgage Lifter tomato is said to have been bred by a guy who cross-pollinated five tomato varieties and saved the seed. He planted that seed and saved its progeny seed for several years until he had a stable descendant plant with the fruit qualities he desired in a tomato. He then sold the seed and made enough money at the time to pay off the mortage to his house. You can now buy Mortgage Lifter tomato seeds from seed catalogs. As this writer says, "Growing heirlooms is a direct link to our heritage, making a connection to generations of gardeners that came before us and extending the link to our children, grandchildren, and beyond." 

Tom standing among the heirloom tomatoes we grew in 2013, Louisiana

Over the years we have saved seed from season to season as well as planted the descendants of plants that our grandparents grew. I have lost count of such plants that we have left behind in our moves, still flourishing, I hope, in our absence. However, we have managed to bring along with us one vegetable that is the descendant of ones my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat and her mother before her grew: bunching onions. My dad has grown these onions for years, and we got our onion plants from him. 

Year after year, we grew these onions, eating what we wanted to eat and saving others for planting the following year. If we moved and were unable to salvage onion plants in the move, my dad always had plenty to give us for planting in our new garden. But then my dad and mom moved, and Dad thinks he may have lost his onions to too much rain and then drought in the garden he left behind. Fortunately, we managed to bring some of those family heirloom onions with us to Arizona, where they have flourished in our garden. So, this year, we may be giving back to my dad the heirlooms we first got from him and that he got from his mother and grandmother. 

Cassie watches as Tom transplants onions in our AZ garden, onions that are descendants of ones my dad, my grandmother and her mother planted in their gardens.

Our bunching onions were primed to grow in the winter in the South, and we didn't know how they would do at a much higher elevation and a much cooler climate. We kept some in pots in our sunroom over last winter, and only a few plants survived. However, the ones we planted in the garden last summer, right after we moved into this house, managed to survive winter temperatures in the single digits. Their growing clock reset, and they flourished this summer, as evidenced in the photos above and below, where only two or three bunches, pulled apart and transplanted singly, filled out two full rows.

Tom pulls apart bunching onions to transplant them.

When we pull the tomato plants out of the greenhouse, Tom plans to plant some onions there, as well, so that we can observe which ones do better, the ones exposed to the winter weather or the ones in a more sheltered space. (The greenhouse is not heated.)

Growing these heirloom onions that my grandmother grew connects me to a history of family gardening, not just vegetable gardening but flower gardening, as well. For years, I also grew purple globe amaranth flowers because they were among my grandmother's favorites. I always got seed from her...until her plants finally died out as she got too fragile to care for them, I moved once too often, and those seeds were lost forever. Now I have to order seeds from gardening catalogs, and they are not always easy to find.

Just like any family heirloom, heirloom vegetables connect us to the past and enrich the present.

Re-purposing What's Been Left Behind

"Upcycling" is a trendy word and a trendy activity these days. Wikipedia defines the term as: "the process of transforming by-products, waste materials, useless and/or unwanted products into new materials or products of better quality or for better environmental value." Many websites and magazines are devoted to upcycling: turn mason jars into candle holders or drinking glasses (my least favorite--I hate mason-jar drinking glasses); turn pallets into sofas or side tables, wine bottles into lamps, a decorative wall, or a chandelier. Recycling is a great idea, but I prefer the term "repurposing" to "upcycling." Upcycling is a bit of a snob; repurposing is practical and down-to-earth.

The previous owners of our house left behind a lot of stuff that we either had to discard or find a way to use or repurpose: cans of paint in the attic, old bicycle parts in an enclosed side yard that now serves as our wood lot, some plastic planter pots, a rabbit cage (and underneath it, buried in rabbit crap, a rug), various other animal cages, a 10X10X6-foot dog pen, a cross fence in the backyard meant to contain dogs when not in the pen.

The cross fence was one of the first things to go; I dismantled it, kept the wooden fence posts and the gate, and rolled up the 2X4 fence wire for future use.

cross fence in our back yard that I took down

Tom replaced the rickety garden gate with this gate from the cross fence I removed. I guess you would call this re-using rather than repurposing.

When I cleaned up the garden area next, I had to decide what to do with the animal cages that had been abandoned there: I turned them into compost bins.

animal cages turned into compost bins

We don't have dogs, so we thought we would sell the dog pen. First, we moved it out of the back yard into a side yard where it could be easily loaded onto a trailer. 

dog pen

Then I had second thoughts. What if I turned it into an outdoor room, instead, and let grape vines cover it? So when my friend Chris was visiting in February, we had her help us move the dog pen again and lower it over a small peach tree near the greenhouse that Tom had just built. The tree serves as shade inside what I now call my "Secret Garden" room, after Frances Hodgson Burnett's book The Secret Garden, which I read as a kid. I painted a 6X8-foot section of cedar fencing to serve as a floor, re-painted a second-hand garden bench and side table for a seating area, and attached reed fencing to one-and-a half sides of the dog pen for a privacy screen. With metal ties, I also attached the limbs of a large grape vine to the back side of the Secret Garden room, and Tom transplanted a smaller grape vine into a flower bed I dug along another side of the room.

"Secret Garden" room, late May

Then I began decorating the room and planting flowers in pots and along the inside of one wall. Tom took the bike rims off of two broken bicycles the previous owners had left behind, and I spray-painted them and attached them to one wall of my outdoor room. I crocheted a hemp rug for the floor and created some decorative hangings.

"Secret Garden" room, early June

crocheted hemp hanging with cut-outs from Peace Tea tins and beer bottle caps

Peace sign at the door, crocheted hemp rug inside

By mid-July, the seasonal "monsoon" rains were coming every day, and I had to remove the hemp rug from the Secret Garden because it stayed wet. By late August, the Secret Garden room was covered in greenery that the monsoon season provides for a short period of time in this dry land.

"Secret Garden" room with greenhouse beyond

"Secret Garden" room with apple tree and greenhouse

"Secret Garden" room--borage, poppies, and daisy fleabane blooming outside

Storm clouds above the "Secret Garden" room

The Secret Garden room is the biggest "repurposing" project we've done here, so far. But I'm always looking for creative ways to reuse or repurpose materials that might otherwise be discarded in a landfill. --Just not mason jars as drinking glasses--Adult "sippy cups"? ugh!

Morning after A Rain

Side yard with Secret Garden room--so green after the rain

According to the U.S. climate data website, the area where we live now gets an annual average of 11.82 inches of precipitation, with the highest monthly averages in July (2.44 inches) and August (3.03 inches), the "monsoon" months. What a difference between here and where we were two years ago, where the annual average of precipitation is 63.58 inches, with the highest monthly averages in January (5.75 inches) and July (6.65 inches). This past week, Louisiana received much more rain at once than usual: thirteen rivers broke flood records and thousands of homes were flooded in areas that had never flooded in human memory. One town received at least 31 inches of rain in 48 hours. That amount of precipitation here would probably cause mudslides on mountains.

Here in northern Arizona yesterday, rain began falling before noon and fell off and on most of the afternoon. I had just enough time to mow the side yard (leaving patches of wildflowers) and then to gather corn between rain showers. Then I spent a couple of hours shucking corn, cutting corn off the cob, and cooking the corn for dinner. 

Cutting corn off the cob--Tom planted an heirloom corn, Golden Bantam. I think we'll try a different one next year.

fresh corn cooking on the stove--I added milk, butter, a couple of serrano peppers from the garden, salt and pepper

Every morning the cats, especially Cassie, pester me to go outside, and this morning after the rain was no exception. The grass was still wet when we ventured out, and everything was clean and bright.

Side yard, with apple trees, Secret Garden room, greenhouse, and patches of wildflowers

apple ripening

morning glories and scarlet runner beans along the garden fence

cowpen daisies along the fence that separates our garden from our neighbors' garden

Peace

In her book, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (which I read 20 years ago), Kathleen Norris quotes a saying of desert monks: "If a man settles in a certain place and does not bring forth the fruit of that place, the place itself casts him out."

I don't know what would be the "fruit" of the volcanic fields at the foot of the White Mountains on the Colorado Plateau, but in cultivating wild flowers and providing space for local pollinators, I guess I'm bringing forth the fruit of this place. And I'm adding fruit of my own in the gardens we grow--with what little rain a valley in a rain shadow can provide.

Lagniappe:

tomatoes fresh from our garden--more canning this weekend

Persey walks in the bright, wet grass

I took this photo of Cassie two days ago. The cats and I prowl our yard together.

Tom in the Kitchen

When I met Tom, we were fifteen years old. I had grown up in the country eating garden-fresh vegetables in-season and meat from grass-fed cattle that my father raised. Tom had most recently lived in Houston, and he had grown up eating tinned meat and store-canned vegetables. But he took to country cooking, and after we married, I quickly ceded to him a great deal of that cooking, cooking which has become more and more health-conscious as we've aged. Lately I've been having some fun cooking meals with fresh vegetables from our Arizona garden, my first tomato pie, a Mexican Pepper casserole with bell peppers from our garden, a squash casserole with squash and peppers from the garden. However, Tom does most of the canning, something he really enjoys. It's really ironic that I'm the one who grew up watching my mother and grandmothers can and freeze vegetables, yet Tom, whose mother never canned anything that I know of, is the one who does the canning now. 

Here's Tom in the kitchen, canning tomatoes that we're growing in our garden. Tomatoes don't ripen here as quickly as they do in the sunny South, so he tends to can only 4-5 pints at a time as we gather enough tomatoes to do so.

Tom even canned a pint of sungold tomatoes!

fresh tomatoes cooking on the stove

The results of Tom's latest canning

We live now at 7200 ft. above sea level, and Tom had to consult the Presto Cooker Canner booklet to get instructions on canning at a higher elevation. He became frustrated with the newest booklet which came with the pressure cooker we bought to replace our old one. The booklet was printed in China, and we're sure the pressure cooker was manufactured there, too, even though National Presto Industries, Inc., still has an Eau Claire, Wisconsin address. The instructions were a little confusing. Fortunately, we had kept the old Presto Cooker-Canner booklet, printed in the 1970s in Wisconsin. The instructions in that booklet on canning at high altitudes were very clear. Here is a sample below, with the most recent publication first.

Instructions for canning at elevation, most recent booklet

Presto Cooker instructions, printed in the 1970s

Add this experience to others we've had with crappy manufacturing from overseas. Hand saws Tom bought years ago are now made in China, and they're flimsy and unusable. Compare a hoe head bought 50 years ago to ones hanging on hooks in a Home Depot or Lowes today--a laughable comparison. Fortunately, Tom is a handy man to have around. Not only did he can tomatoes last weekend; he also replaced a hoe handle I had broken. Good man.

Death in the Garden

When I headed out this morning at 7 AM to dig up 2 1/2 rows of red potatoes, I expected an uneventful gardening experience. Tom had canned tomatoes on Saturday, and my contribution to our gardening enterprise was to do some of the manual labor, which I actually prefer, anyway, to canning. The cats accompanied me outside, Persey sleeping most of the morning in the Secret Garden room that I created out of a 10'X10' dog pen, and Cassie wandering around the yard and garden on the lookout for mischief.

The garden this morning, after I had dug up a few potato plants

After turning over half of a row of potatoes, I looked back at the work I had done so far and saw something small wriggling on the upturned soil. I bent for a closer look. With my spade, I had dug up a nest of what I first took to be mice but that later I suspected were moles. The creatures were very tiny, without hair, and obviously in distress. What to do? We live far from any conservation group that might want to take in tiny moles still nursing, and since I had violently--though unintentionally--disturbed the nest, the little things wouldn't live.

What I inadvertently dug up when I was spading up potatoes

So I put the creatures back in the soil where they had been, knowing that they would die there. Of course, Cassie, who had been incommunicado when I had called for her a few minutes earlier, showed up, and, when my back was turned, dug up one of the tiny critters.

Cassie with her tiny catch

I took the little mammal baby from her, knowing that Mama Mole would reject these little creatures because they had been handled and disturbed. I returned it to the garden, and closed the garden gate so that Cassie could not return. However, later that morning she snuck up onto the greenhouse roof and down into the garden, making off with another mole--which I "rescued," after a manner of speaking because nothing was going to save these creatures from death.

Cassie makes off with a baby mole a second time

Later I did look up on the Internet how to take care of baby moles, but, really, it was way too late. These little guys didn't even have their fur yet. And I'm not the nurturing type. I have a rather jaundiced view of nature red in tooth and claw--even though there is much in nature that is lovely and mysterious. And as I type this I am reminded of something that the Polish poet and writer Czeslaw Milosz observed about nature in his published journal A Year of the Hunter. I took the book down from the shelf behind my desk and flipped through it, for I knew that I had underlined several passages.

I opened the book immediately to this: "I am not a passionate admirer of Nature," Milosz admits on March 30, 1988, "because Nature is a pain, but I still feel the presence--inborn, inherent--of a tree, an animal, a flower...." And in an earlier entry in September 1987, he describes nature programs on PBS as "obscene" because the scientific approach to these programs includes humans as part of the cycle of nature as any other creature and, because of that, people "must accept the world as it is," without moral force. He is "horrified by the images of mutual indifferent devouring" and wonders how the message of that indifference translates into human society (and how children, for whom these programs are created, interpret that message). He asks: "Is hunting and devouring each other the very essence of Nature?" And answers: "It is, and that is why I dislike Nature."

I don't dislike Nature, but I recognize its indifference. A parent of these little creatures made a nest in garden soil in an Arizona garden. Today, I dug potatoes in that garden and destroyed the nest. I guess I'm a force of Nature, just like my cat Cassie,  though not totally indifferent to the suffering.

I continued with my work.

At the end of the row where the tiny creatures met their fate.

The completed work, stones marking near the center of the photo the dirt tomb of the moles.

The potatoes I dug, drying and curing in the pantry

I suspect that one reason Czeslaw Milosz hated Nature is that it reminded him of the fragility of his own body, that he also, despite his intellect, morality, and fine-tuned emotions, was subject to that same indifferent force, for he also muses in an earlier entry: "The dividing line between life and death is so fine. The unbelievable fragility of our organism, which suggests a vision: a fog of sorts condenses into human form, lasts for a moment, and is instantly dispelled." 

So, here....a poppy memorial for the fragile lives that I destroyed today.

Note: The other lives I destroyed today were the potato plants--"devouring," the "very essence of Nature."

Today's Leftovers: Cats, Flowers, and other Stuff

Cassie on the garden gate one evening earlier this week

Just a few minutes ago, I finished a half glass of wine left over from yesterday--Beringer White Zinfandel. We had carried a chilled bottle of the sweet fruity wine to a local event last night and returned home with about half a bottle, most of which I finished off before bedtime except for this little bit of half a glass. I had poured a second glass--very full--started to drink it, and realized, really, I had had too much wine for the evening. I used a funnel to pour the rest back into the bottle. So this half glass I just finished off was really, really the leftovers of yesterday. Tom and I also finished off the neufchatel cheese mixture I had used to make some appetizers for the same event. I slathered the cheese mixture (neufchatel, chopped fresh dill, heavy cream, horseradish) on some crackers and topped it with chopped-up cucumbers. Tom omitted chopping the cucumbers for his neufchatel-cucumber cracker topping.

That's what today has been for me, a left-over kind of day. I wandered around the yard, pulling and chopping weeds; taking the cats out for their daily backyard exercise and entertainment; washing, drying, and folding some clothes; reading the daily headlines online; putzing around on the Internet. Tom was far more ambitious: he canned tomatoes from our garden. Maybe I should be shamed by his energetic activities, but I'm not. Tom likes to can. Maybe tomorrow I will post left-overs from today, which will include photos of Tom's canning. Right now he's in the garage putting a new hoe handle on a hoe that I broke while hoeing weeds a few days ago. 

So today's post is a post of leftovers, photos of the cats I took yesterday and the day before, of flowers I didn't include in my last post. Just a putzing day.....

First leftovers, photos of the cats doing what cats do....

Cassie in an apple tree in our apple orchard (of three apple trees)

Cassie on the greenhouse door, our garden, and rain clouds in the background

Cassie and Persey--Their step up to the roof of the greenhouse is from the empty rabbit hutch

Persey is 14 years old, but since she's lost weight, she's gotten a lot friskier.

Second leftovers are photos of wildflowers that I took in our yard as I am trying to identify them. The Golden crownbeard below--other common names, cowpen daisy, cow pasture-daisy, girasolillo, butter-daisy, hierba de la bruja--came up in our garden last year, and I liked the flowers so well that I scattered seed along one side of the garden as well as in the backyard. My Arizona plant identification book claims that "Native Americans and early settlers used [the] plant to treat skin diseases and boils" and that "Hopi Indians use water of [the] steeped plant for treating spider bites." I like their blowzy look.

Golden Crownbeard, or cowpen daisy (Verbesina encelioides)

Another wild plant that I have decided to cultivate in our yard is the rayless gumweed. The plant isn't really pretty, and it's flowers aren't showy, but I like the odd look of its gummy flowers. Also, Zoe Merriman Kirkpatrick, author of Wildflowers of the Western Plains: A Guide (1992), writes that she learned that Native American Pueblo women use the plant "as a dye source for the wool in their blankets," achieving "lovely hues of yellow, gold, and olive-green." Plants are coming up voluntarily all over our yard. 

Rayless gumweed (Grindelia aphanactis)

And finally, the remains of a day earlier this week...clouds near sunset...