The Angel of the Killing Frost Comes By

Last night he descended on our hill, and with a touch of his icy blade felled the peppers and the eggplants and the nicotiana, and turned the unripe figs to frozen lumps.  I must remember to salvage the figs for the hens, who will appreciate them now that bugs and green grass are history.

 A couple of days earlier I had brought the two geraniums and the Meyer lemon into the house for the winter, and the five big lemons on the tiny tree are now slowly turning yellow next to a sunny window.

I also brought in the big pot of rosemary.  I forgot that I had given it a good watering the day before, and when I went to lift it it was so heavy that I almost dropped it.  But I have never yet dropped anything I've tried to lift, and once I've got something in my arms I am loath to call for help.  So I staggered and groaned and finally got the pot up the two steps into the sun porch where it will live until the spring.  And I thanked my lucky stars for my relatively short back, which has never "gone out" on me yet.  But in the future I must remember not to water the big pots before moving them.

It's time to wrap the Leyland cypresses in their burlap coats, to defend them not from the cold but from the deer.  Last winter, on the pretext that the wild apple crop had failed, the deer tiptoed right up to the house and munched on the evergreens.  This year has been great for apples--you can see piles of them littering the roadsides--but I'm not taking any chances.

I must also remember to put those plastic spiral trunk shields on the fruit trees before the rabbits start chewing on their bark.  And I have to figure out a way to protect the climbing roses against those same rabbits, though I can't see how I can wrap burlap around their thorny branches.  Maybe chicken wire?

Then it will all be done, except for setting up the bird feeder now that the bears have safely gone into their dens.  And then I too can finally--except for picking the chard and the kale, which continue to thumb their noses at the Frozen One--go into hibernation too.

Espaliered Apricots

I come from an espaliering culture.  

The civilized landscape of my native Catalonia was striated with vineyards, the vines trained uni-dimensionally along wires.  Fruit trees were espaliered on wires as well, but my favorites were the ones "crucified," as my mother's sister used to say, against an old garden wall, apricots and peaches glowing yellow to red in the reflected heat of the Mediterranean sun.

Last year I decided to grow my favorite fruit, apricots.  The Vermont climate being risky for anything softer than apples, I thought that the south-facing wall of the house would offer maximum protection.  And it would give me a reason to try my hand at espaliering.

The guy I bought the tree from gave me what advice he could on which limbs to cut and which to train horizontally, but I could tell that this was just book learning. Vermont is not an espaliering culture.  "Let me know if it survives," he said, loading the little tree on the back of the Subaru.  "I'll bring you an apricot next summer," I promised him.

I'm sorry to say, he won't get his apricot.  That's because my spouse and I just ate the entire 2013 apricot harvest, still hot from the sun:

  

They were delicious, the flesh sweet and firm and perfumed.  One of the fruits had a tiny worm at the blossom end, and was all the sweeter for it.

Not much of a harvest, you say?  I think it was a remarkable feat for the little tree to bear those three apricots given the climate, its youth, my inexperience, and the fact that in the middle of winter a hungry rabbit stripped most of the bark off its trunk.

This fall I'll do a better job of rabbit pre-emption, and with any luck at all next year we'll have apricots enough to share. 

Espalier

I was out planting chard this morning when out of the corner of my eye I saw a spray of white against the south wall of the house.  It was the little apricot tree that I espaliered last spring.  It had survived the winter and the rabbit depredations, and overnight it had burst into bloom.

I took a closer look and saw no insects other than a couple of ants that I'm sure were looking for a way to get into the kitchen.  It's been so chilly--in the 20s last night--that the bugs aren't out yet. But the little apricot tree was clearly ready for them, so I got my trusty watercolor brush and pretended I was a bee.  I did a pretty good job pollinating the indoor lemon tree a couple of months ago, so I'm hoping that my attentions with the watercolor brush will be rewarded.

Warm from the sun, raspy in the hand, sweet and spicy on the tongue:  apricots!