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.

Slouching Towards Winter

There was frost on the grass this morning, and Wolfie, stimulated by the chill, raced around and skidded and slipped and almost fell.  Good practice for icy mornings to come.

I thought the cold night might have done in the beans, but no such luck.  By noon they were looking as perky as they did in August.  The eggplants and banana peppers are still bearing, and the chard and kale, needless to say, are chugging along as if The Killing Frost weren't around the corner.

Because it was a nice day in which to do the job, I brought in my two zonal geraniums and put them by a south-facing window.  They will stop blooming for a while, but when the snow covers the ground outside, the reflected light will stimulate them to bloom again.

I gave the scented geraniums in their heavy pots a good pruning and dragged them inside for the winter.  I did the same for the big rosemary bush.  Please understand that I mean "big" by Vermont standards.  Rosemary cannot survive our winters and has to be brought indoors, which means it has to be kept in a pot, which keeps it from reaching its full splendor.

Still, I'm quite pleased with my rosemary, which made it through last winter and is the first rosemary plant that hasn't given up the ghost within two weeks of being brought into my house.  I owe this success to my herbalist friend Dona, who told me that rosemary hates to be moved.  I paid attention to her advice and kept the pot anchored next to a south-facing window, refusing to move it even to make room for the Christmas tree.

Also, remembering that the name "rosemary" comes from the Latin ros marinus, meaning sea-dew, and that it grows in the semi-arid hills near the Mediterranean, I kept the soil fairly dry but misted the needles after feeding the dogs every morning.  The plant rewarded me by covering itself with lavender-colored blooms and hanging on until late spring, when it could go back outside.

The rosemary and scented geranium clippings are now drying on woven-straw trays in the dining room.  Does this herb business never stop?  I had finally finished stripping the oregano, thyme and lavender (three whole cups of lavender blossoms, of which I am inordinately proud), and now here are these handfuls of heavenly-smelling leaves that I cannot possibly throw away....

Meanwhile Bisou is mourning the disappearance of her frogs, which have abandoned the warm stones of the patio and dived into the depths of the pond, there to slumber cozily until the spring frenzy wakes them up, a long, long time from now.

And Behold, It Was Good

The cylinder in my cheese press is about four inches in diameter. That means that if you start with a gallon of milk, and it yields a pound of curds, you end up with a nice round cheese about 3/4" thick. But I only had a couple of quarts of milk, given Virginia Slim's petite proportions, which yielded a much smaller amount of curds, so what came out of the press was a very thin cheese.

But good. Very mild, and tasting of rosemary. Next time I'll increase the rosemary, because I love the way its tang livens up the mildness of the cheese.

Today I'll make the same cheese, but flavor it with garlic instead of rosemary. And then it will be time for hot pepper cheese, made with my own amazingly hot peppers.

Thank you, Virginia Slim!

The Nose In Winter

Took advantage of a heat wave (35F and no wind) today and went for a ramble in the woods behind the house, with Wolfie.

The snow was deep, and the woods were silent. Wolfie led me to the remains—a few orange feathers on the snow—of the hen that died in early winter. I had given her an eco-burial by leaving her under a tree and hoping that some creature would make a meal of her. The snow all around the feathers was crisscrossed with tracks, mostly fox and coyote.

While Wolfie methodically smelled the feathers, the tracks, and the tree trunks against which something had sprayed or scratched, I smelled nothing. I heard nothing. In winter the ears, but especially the nose are largely deprived of stimuli by Nature. (The human nose, that is. The canine nose is never deprived of anything.)

Inside my house, however, it's a different story. This winter's challenge is to keep alive a large rosemary bush that I brought inside in the fall. Rosemary cannot survive Vermont winters outdoors, but it is almost as difficult to get it to survive indoors.

Because my plant-guru friend Dona had admonished me that rosemary hates to be moved, at Christmas we had to jam the tree in a less-than optimal corner, because I refused to upset the rosemary by moving it. A native of the semi-arid Mediterranean, rosemary promptly gives up the ghost if it is over-watered. On the other hand, the indoor climate in winter can be Sahara-like, and rosemary's needle-thin leaves will dry up and drop off even as you fill the watering can. Every morning, in my pajamas, I can be seen spritzer in hand spritzing the rosemary, trying my best to give the effect of morning dew, and looking for signs of trouble.

I am happy to report that, after some initial pouting, the rosemary has settled in for the duration, and covered itself all over with tiny azure blooms. But the best part of the rosemary bush is that when I stroke it, or when Wolfie whacks it with his tail, it releases the smell of a Mediterranean hillside.

Next to the rosemary huddles a smaller lavender plant that I brought inside because I felt sorry for it, even though certain kinds of lavender are supposed to be able to take the winters here. It's starting to look kind of scraggly, despite careful waterings and spritzings, but I think that as the light grows stronger in the south-facing sun room in which it lives, it will cheer up. Meanwhile, it too gives off that Mediterranean smell.

Then there are the lemon/rose-scented geraniums. Unlike the rosemary and lavender, these are practically indestructible. Give them a bit of sun and they will grow as if they had been designed by Nature to live indoors. To keep their bushy shape, I periodically pinch off their top leaves, which makes my fingers smell delicious. Then I carefully dry and store the prunings for future pot-pourris. I've heard that you can pour boiling water over scented-geranium leaves and make tea, but I haven't tried that yet.

Lastly, there is the orange peel, which I save and set out to dry in a basket on the dining room table. When it's brittle I snap it into tiny pieces and store it in an old blue canning jar, where it looks nice. Orange peel works well as a fixative for pot-pourri, and smells terrific.

Rosemary, lavender, orange, geraniums.... I forgot to mention my little laurel tree! In the midst of a Vermont winter, I am surrounded by the plants and smells of a Catalan summer. A small miracle, but it will help me survive until lilac-time.