Crimes Against Nature: Fig

Any day now, the Angel of the Killing Frost will descend to put an end to the 2013 gardening season.  Vermont gardeners will store away their tools and retire to their wood stoves with a book, tablet, e-reader, laptop or, in the lucky areas that have reception, smartphone.

Usually I can hardly wait for the Icy One to alight on our hill.  The thought of roasting another batch of eggplants or freezing another quart of beans makes me grow faint.  But this year is different.  This year I have a fig tree, with figs on it--seven, in fact.  It used to have nine, but I ate two.  They were so splendid, fat and ripe and warm from the sun, that I resolved to do all I can to bring the rest to, well, fruition.

This means frequent watering--my tree is in a pot--with buckets of fish-manure-enriched water from the goldfish tub.  It means sheltering it from the wind in the corner of the south-facing wall of the house and the enclosed porch, where it can grab every drop of sun and warmth that the waning season has to offer.  And it means going out a couple of times a day to see if there is anything I can do to make it more comfortable.

This way, even with the temperature hovering dangerously low at night, the figs still ripen, one at a time.  And I eat each one mindfully and reverently, amazed that such Mediterranean sweetness can  emerge from this Puritan soil.

It is a crime against Nature, or at least a misdemeanor, to try to grow figs in Vermont.  Figs need long strings of warm, sunny days to ripen, a moderately dry climate to concentrate the sugars in the fruit, and temperate winters.

The label on my tree, a Brown Turkey, assures me that it will be happy in its pot and survive temperatures as frigid as -10F.  People around here say they remember winters when the temperature would stay below zero for weeks on end, and reach twenty- and thirty-below at night.  In my nine winters in Vermont there's been nothing like this.  Occasionally there will be a fifteen-below night, but things soon warm up.  Still, I don't want to take any chances with my little tree, and am researching thermal blankets made especially for tender plants.  The fact that somebody out there actually makes and sells plant blankies tells me that I am not the only crazed gardener on the planet.

Why, you ask, go to all this trouble for just a couple of figs?  The answer lies not in the figs themselves, but in the warm sweet smell of the raspy leaves, which sends me back every time to those long-ago Catalan summers and the buggy rides to la figuera grossa, which was so enormous that the entire extended family, including the horse, could eat their lunch and then nap in its shade.

Heat Rash

This is the kind of weather that I dread.  It keeps me plotting and strategizing round the clock on ways to avoid it:  work outside only in the early morning (but then I'm sleepy because it was too hot to fall sleep the night before);  close all windows and shades to keep the heat out (but a dark house is so depressing);  pretend it's the middle of January and forget about gardening (but the beans must be planted, and right away).

And yet here, in the hottest part of the day, it is only 90F.  Compared to most of the nation, this doesn't even qualify as hot, and compared to future summers, it may be barely warm.  It's not so much the heat that's bothering me as the awareness of how summers have gotten so hot so fast, and the thought that we may be heading towards the tipping point that will cause a cascade of further catastrophes.  And that so many people are still denying the reality of global warming.

I suppose that if you live in an air-conditioned house, drive an air-conditioned car, amuse yourself in an air-conditioned mall, and never set foot outdoors from April to November, you can fool yourself into thinking that all is well.  Until, of course, the power goes out, as it has done in large areas of DC.

And that is the single bit of weather-related good news I have heard lately.  One and a half million houses and businesses are without power in the DC area.  I realize that many of those houses and businesses belong to the poor, who already have enough to contend with, and I feel bad about that.  But I'm hoping that maybe some of the global-warming-denying politicians will be left to swelter in their Georgetown row-houses, and they will begin to realize that the climate problem is more than a left-wing delusion.  And maybe do something about it. 

Just the tiniest sign that they're beginning to move in the right direction would make me so happy, I'd gladly stop complaining about the heat.

I Think I Saved The Apple Crop!

I'm not sure what happened in the rest of the country after last week's apocalyptic heat, but here in Vermont the all-time highs were succeeded by two nights of hard frost, which was made worse by howling northwest winds.  We had plenty of warning that the cold was coming, so I asked my spouse to help me save the 2012 apple harvest by covering Freedom and Liberty, my two little apple trees, which had been lured by the hot days to impending bloom.

Fortunately for us, at the moment the trees were even smaller than usual, having just undergone my annual enthusiastic pruning.  Even so, when you walk right up to it, a tree always turns out to be much bigger than you expected.  We flung a large plastic tarp over Liberty, taking care not to damage the spindly end branches.  But we had only one tarp, and when I unfolded the twin-bed sheet I had brought for Freedom, my spouse let out a derisive cackle.

"O.k., I'll get a bigger sheet," I said, and went to the linen closet and came out with a queen-size sheet.  But that wasn't big enough either.  We ended up standing on the patio, being buffeted by arctic gusts as we struggled to attach two big sheets together with binder clips.  This required many binder clips, and some kept coming off because our fingers were clumsy with cold, but finally we hoisted the enlarged sheet over Freedom and fastened the bottom edges together as best we could with some more binder clips.  The wind was so strong that it kept inflating both tarp and sheets like balloons, and I expressed a concern that the trees would be uprooted and carried off over the Green Mountains into New Hampshire.

I didn't have much hope, what with the wind and the freezing rain and the two nights of temperatures in the teens, that the buds would make it, but at least my conscience was clear.  I kept looking out, making sure that the covers were still on, wondering if they were doing any good.  Their skinny trunks swaying in the gale, the trees looked like two enormous lollipops.

This morning, having checked that the forecast lows would not drop below 30F, I removed the tarp and the sheets.  The buds, as far as I could tell,  had survived. 

I was standing on the patio unfastening binder clips when two Canada geese flew honking overhead.  They must have come from the pond hidden back in the woods, and they were flying so low that I could hear the whoosh of their wing beats.  They disappeared behind the roof, but came back and flew over me again, and then again.  They were flying in circles around the house, and one of them was clearly chasing the other, though the one being chased didn't seem to mind.  They were scrawny geese, with extra-long necks, loud and raucous:  juvenile males, I guessed, feeling the season, letting off steam.

Where Are The Snows Of Yesteryear?*

I've had enough of this sad, brown, gray, muddy winter.  This is not what I came to Vermont for.  I came to Vermont for bright snow and bracing cold, and for contrast--between white and green, cold and warmth, winter and spring.

People around here look at each other and say "We sure got a break this year!"  and  "We're being spoiled!"  In the woods all around, maple trees are being tapped, and steam is rising from the sugaring sheds behind farmhouses.  A dull yellow haze is already visible at the tips of willow branches.  Gardeners are actually out weeding their flower beds.  In the middle of February, we're experiencing early April.

And it feels wrong, wrong, wrong.  My lavender and rose bushes are sweating under the heavy hay mulch I tucked around them in October.  The balls I throw for the dogs, instead of bouncing smartly off the frozen ground, roll dispiritedly on the mud.  And my zonal geraniums, which, stimulated by the sun's reflection on snow, used to bloom profusely by my kitchen windows, are boringly green instead of full of red blooms.  In the woods, I am sure, the ticks are stirring, ready to pounce.

Right this minute, it is snowing.  It brings tears to my eyes, how theatrical the woods behind the house look.  The ground is momentarily pure white, and every single tree branch is outlined as if by a calligraphy pen.  The snow pours down like lace.  How I have missed this!

But I must not attach.  According to the weather gurus, this is no storm, but just a snow shower.  We're going up to the high 30s tomorrow, and all the glory will be gone by mid-morning.  Yesterday, I saw an unmistakable yellow stripe on the back of a male goldfinch at the feeder.  The fields are covered in deer droppings--our herd of five has not felt the need to hibernate deep in the secret "deer beds" as in other years.  They come placidly out of the woods in the late afternoon, like cows, and graze. 

I don't want the gardening season to start any earlier.  I want to hibernate.  I want to wake up to see signs on the snow of the goings on of the preceding night, to see who-all--deer, fox, rabbit, porcupine, domestic shorthair--wandered into our front yard.  I want empty winter time during which to gather my inner resources, gird my loins for the season of growth. 

Please,  mall-bound drivers of larger-than-needed vehicles, heat- and air-conditioning abusers, and you who leave the lights blazing in the room you have just exited, don't take away our winter!

*  This is the refrain of Ballade des dames du temps jadis (Ballad of the Ladies of Yesteryear), by Francois Villon, a 15th century French poet.

Good Advice From Old Voltaire

In 1755, an earthquake followed by a tidal wave and a city-wide fire destroyed Lisbon and killed 40,000 people.  (Sound familiar?). In a rage at the random maliciousness of fate--and especially in a rage against the followers of Leibnitz, who believed that a world created by a perfect God must of necessity be ultimately perfect--Voltaire wrote Candide.  The hero of the story, a naive and optimistic soul, undergoes a series of catastrophes before retiring, a sadder but wiser man, to the countryside where, in an Age of Enlightenment commune, he and his friends raise their own food, bake their own bread, and weave their own cloth.  His parting words at the end of the story, and Voltaire's message to the ages:  "We must cultivate our garden."

How curious that today Voltaire's advice works not only metaphorically (work hard, take care of yourself, be good to those around you), but literally:  in a time when a single month's climate-induced catastrophes dwarf the Lisbon disaster, it is a very good thing to cultivate our garden.

By growing at least some of our own food we decrease the number of refrigerated trucks spewing emissions on our highways.  We save trips to the grocery store, spewing ditto.  We increase the number of oxygen-producing green things.  We give our bodies the best possible nutrition and some much-needed exercise.  And by getting our hands dirty we come in contact with soil micro-organisms that stimulate serotonin production in the brain...which may give us just the right dose of optimism to keep us going in these apocalyptic times.

This is what I've been cultivating.  Back row, from left to right, tomatoes, butternut squash and delicata squash.  Middle row, broccoli; lettuce, mustard and zucchini (the zucchini will take over when the salad greens bolt);  Swiss chard.  Front row, kale, peas (not doing well due to recent hot spell), and more broccoli.  The tropical-looking stuff along the right side is rhubarb.