The Chickens' Thanksgiving

The equinox is past, and we're careening towards the solstice.  A delicately-nurtured turkey has been ordered from a nearby farm--my quick-and-easy contribution to the Thangsgiving meal that my descendants will prepare.

But my hens celebrate Thanksgiving on a different schedule, sometime between the Canadian and the U.S. holidays.  Like ours, their day of gratitude does not have a fixed date.  It happens just before or just after the first frost, on the day when I, breathing stertorous sighs of relief, finally put the garden to bed.

I normally take frost warnings with a grain of salt, given the near-Floridian microclimate behind our house.  But this year I heeded the Vermont Public Radio weather prophet and, as the wind picked up and the temperature dropped a couple of days ago, I harvested enough green tomatoes to fill two windowsills, and a peck of peppers and eggplants.

It's a good thing I did, because the next morning, with the temperature at 25F, all the nightshades--tomatoes, peppers and eggplants--which had thrived in our hot and dry Mediterranean summer had perished.  That gave me permission to bring the 2012 garden to an end.

The tomato stems were withered, but plenty of tomatoes--some green, some tiny, some cracked--were still clinging to them.  I cut the stems, trying to save every last fruit, untangled them from the tomato cages and threw the lot over the fence into the chicken yard.  Although inside the coop they will let me pick them up and hold them in my arms, the hens, dear inflexible critters that they are, fled as I dumped the tomatoes into their domain. 

This was followed by a forest of eggplants, with finger-long fruits and flowers still attached.  Normally, I rejoice if I get half a dozen eggplants  in a given summer.  But this year I have eaten and roasted and frozen and given away pounds of eggplants, the long skinny Japanese ones that melt in your mouth. 

Then came the broccoli, twelve stalwart plants that had been producing non-stop since June.  As I yanked them out I saw that the dirt under them was covered with mushrooms.  For a moment I thought, surely nothing deadly could possibly grow from my home-made compost, under my holy broccoli?  Putting aside that thought, I dragged the broccoli trees one by one to the chicken yard.

By then the hens had figured out that this was their last hurrah before the long winter of laying pellets and coffee grounds, and were going after those tomatoes and artisanal eggplants.  They will peck at the broccoli for the next couple of weeks, until nothing is left but the barely-green skeletons.  Their Thanksgiving lasts longer than ours.

While they feasted I cleared a couple of beds and planted the garlic I had gotten from a couple of garlic priestesses at the Bennington Garlic Festival.  If all goes well, by next summer I should be able to furnish my own booth at the Garlic Festival.  (Check this blog for Garlic Giveaways!)

But you should not conclude from all this that summer is really over.  Yesterday, while geese were honking overhead, I saw the male bluebird, his colors looking muted, sitting on the roof of his abandoned house.  He banged into our window again and then perched on the apple tree.  I wish he, and the still-flourishing kale and chard in the garden, would get the message and depart, and let me get on with winter already.

L Is For Longing

These days my longing--and I'm not the only gardener to feel this way--is for a killing frost.  The vegetable garden is in its late-summer, decadent, disheveled, yet curiously productive stage.

The squashes that I managed to save from the squash bugs are curing in the shed.  The vines, with their cargo of killer eggs, nymphs, and adult bugs are returning to the Earth somewhere out in the front field.  Meanwhile the  pumpkin vine, which somehow escaped the bug plague, is succumbing to a different scourge.  This one turns the green leaves first silver, then brown, but doesn't bother the pumpkins.

I have, for the first time in my gardening life, given up on the broccoli.  The thirty-two plants that I bought in a blizzard in March have not stopped to take a breath since I put them in the ground.  I have frozen all the broccoli that my freezer can hold.  I have given away pounds of the stuff.  Now I'm just letting it bloom its heart out, and as soon as I can spare five minutes I'll pull out all the plants and give them to those magicians, the hens, who will transmute them into eggs.

The tomato plants have died of some mysterious disease that killed them from the bottom up.  That has not, however, prevented them from producing quantities of fruit, many of which are still clinging to their parent's cadaver and ripening slowly. 

The beans, which as usual I planted late, are just starting to set fruit, and there is frost in the forecast for later this week.  I know I should leave the beans to meet their fate on their own, but my maternal nature  rebels against letting those tender babies freeze to death.  Since they're in a 4'x4' raised bed, it should only take me a couple of minutes to throw an old shower curtain over them.  And remember to take it off in the morning.  And put it on again at night, and take it off....

The coming frost, unfortunately, will not help where the kale and chard are concerned.  These will continue to haunt me well into November, demanding to be picked and washed and chopped and blanched and disposed of somehow.  Thank heaven for the local food bank, which gives meaning and raison d'etre to the otherwise absurd productivity of my nine 4'x4' beds.

I cannot figure out how so much food can come out of so little space--and no particular thanks to my gardening talents.  All I do is throw the used hen house litter on the beds in the fall, bung in some seeds and transplants in the spring, pull a couple of weeds while the plants are young, and then harvest until my arms give out.

Yesterday I gathered seventeen pounds of veggies for the food bank.  (Wolfie helped by breaking off a number of kale branches for himself and Bisou to munch.)  You think that finished my harvest season?  Alas, I barely made a dent.  I finally had to stop picking because of the mosquitoes, who were bent on storing up my blood for the winter.  As I walked towards the house I could hear behind me the whisper of the kale and chard, growing new leaves.

The Harvester's Complaint

Today I pulled up the tomato vines and removed their wire cages.  There were still green tomatoes on the vines, but I needed to get rid of the plants so we could install another of the raised beds that my husband made early in the summer.   

Now five of the nine beds are in, but only three have been filled.  It takes a huge amount of dirt and compost to fill a 4'x4'x2' box.  We are using the dirt that was removed during the making of the patio and fish pond, and left in piles at the edge of the woods.  We cannot transport it in the garden cart because we would have to lift the loaded cart over the 2' walls of the beds.  Instead, we use a large plastic tub with a handle on each side, my husband holding one and I the other.  Those tubs of dirt are terribly heavy--far worse than boxes of books--and, keeping our backs in mind, I only let us do a few tubfuls at a time.  Which means that it is taking forever to fill those beds.


Meanwhile, the garden is still going great guns.  Guarded by squadrons of daddy long legs, the beans are maturing so fast that by the time I get to them, many are as thick as fingers.  Fortunately Wolfie and Bisou find them almost as tasty as chicken legs, so I am saved from the great sin of letting a single bean go to waste.


After the bean picking, I realized that the banana peppers think that we are still in August.  I relieved the plants of all but the smallest fruit, and went into the kitchen.  I filled the blanching pot with water and set it on the stove.  While the water heated (which, as those of you know who have an electric stove, takes eons), I seeded and sliced the peppers and put them in the dehydrator.  By the time I was done with that, the water was boiling, and I put the beans in it to blanch.  Then I cooled them in ice water, put them in bags, and took them down to the freezer.

I stuffed the beans into the freezer, and then had trouble closing the door.  If this Indian summer doesn't go away soon, we'll have to buy another freezer.  Did I mention that the pepper plants are full of blooms, that the chard and kale are flourishing, that the bean plants are loaded with baby beans?  In fact, I should probably be out there picking those little beans right now, before they get so big they're only good for the dogs.

Summer Sauce

The house smells strongly of tomato sauce today. I went out into the garden after breakfast and filled the basket with members of my favorite, the nightshade family: banana peppers, eggplant, Roma tomatoes. I brought in my first garlic harvest, too: five tiny garlic heads, hardly bigger than the parent garlic cloves I had pushed into the dirt around the new rosebushes. Garlic is supposed to protect roses, and it did, but at its own expense: the roses grew and prospered, the garlic failed to thrive.

In the kitchen I chopped a (store-bought) onion while I heated olive oil in my four-gallon pot. While the onion was sauteeing I cleaned the baby garlics and threw those in. I chopped and seeded the banana peppers, which I grow because they are more resistant to pests than the sweet kind, yet not as hellishly hot as the hot kind. I threw in a couple of eggplants, too (I never get a lot of eggplants at one time), and then the tomatoes.

I only grow Roma tomatoes, because they are good for eating fresh and making sauce, and are pretty immune to tomato ills. Still, this is the first time in a couple of years that I've had enough ripe tomatoes at one time to make sauce. Last year, although my Romas weren't touched by the blight that affected the entire East coast, they weren't productive enough for me to do anything but dry them in the dehydrator.

A few of the tomatoes I picked today were afflicted with blossom-end rot, which betrays my distaste for regular watering. But most of them were fine, and I sliced off the stem ends to feed to the hens later, and chopped them into threes and threw them in the pot. I added salt and pepper and a handful of last year's oregano that failed to survive this winter. I turned down the heat and went on with my day.

Tonight I will pour the cooked-down sauce into the blender--that's my way of dealing with tomato skins--and pour it into quart-sized plastic jars, label it and put it in the freezer, and feel like a squirrel that's stored away one more nut against the coming winter.

Some Uses Of Zucchini

She slew the fearsome Beast with one blow of her giant Zucchini.

She Finds The Fertility Of Her Garden Both Exhilarating And Alarming

September 13, 2008 "In Squirrel Mode"

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• Oct 8, 2008
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We bring in the harvest

It's late summer, and the garden is in its manic phase again. Everything is happening at once: the tomatoes are (finally!) ripening; and must be made into sauce. The eggplants are getting bigger by the minute, and if I don't pick them at their peak, they will lose their sweetness. Meanwhile, the cool weather crops, which in Vermont endure through the summer, continue to need harvesting, or go to waste.

But the most dramatic onslaught comes from the beans. One day there are only flowers on the bushes. The next, fully adult beans are hanging from the stems. Quick! I must get them while they're tender. I spend hours picking, snapping, blanching, cooling, packing. The next day, strolling through the garden looking for some chard, I part a couple of bean plants out of idle curiosity and lo! pounds more beans have ripened overnight.

All day long, basket in hand, I run from garden to kitchen and down the basement steps to the humming freezer, exclaiming that this is ridiculous, how can these plants produce so much from plain dirt, I haven't time to deal with all this, when will it end? I bemoan my compulsion to not let a single smidgeon go to waste. Those overgrown zucchini should go to the chickens. I could boil up some of that extra chard and kale and mix it with the dogs' food—it's good for them and it would save some of the outrageously expensive kibble I feed them. A saner person would turn her back on the late summer garden and say enough! But I am not that person.

In reality, I am never happier than when I am “putting food by.” Every summer I grow pounds and pounds of produce in my little garden, give it away to my children and to the local food bank. The rest I dry or freeze for my husband and me and for the dogs and chickens (who like nothing more than a handful of steamed veggies on a cold winter day). It gives me an atavistic feeling of security. Who needs stocks and bonds when there are jars of dried tomatoes on the kitchen counter and strings of hot peppers hanging at the kitchen window?

Compared to the preserving habits of our great-grandmothers, my squirrel techniques border on the primitive. I don't dry meats, or can vegetables, or preserve eggs in lard, or make those gorgeous jars of jams and jellies and pickles. I just freeze a bunch of stuff, and dry tomatoes and peppers. But even as I manipulate stove, dryer, and freezer I am echoing the activities of the animals in the woods behind the house: the bear fattening on berries (lucky beast, he carries his food-stores under his skin); the field mice carting off bits of laying mash that the chickens spill; and the squirrels, maniacally storing nuts. Are they anxious, I wonder? Do they dread the coming snows and bitter winds? But I see the perky motions of the squirrels, the way they hold up their fluffy tails, their air of busy self-importance, and I know that for them, too, this is a happy time of year.