Winter Comforts

It's getting seriously cold and snowy here, so I spent part of the day yesterday making sure the animals and plants were comfy.

The hens got special attention, since my geriatric flock is now down to six.  One disappeared mysteriously before we left for my mother's funeral, and another, who'd been looking poorly for over a year, perished when the weather turned frigid while we were gone.  (In case you're wondering, when one of our chickens dies we take the corpse out to the woods to provide some wild critter's dinner.  It's always gone by morning.)

I gave the hens some extra wood shavings for bedding, and a "poultry hot-cake"--a cylinder of high-protein food that I hang from a string so they can peck at it and be both nourished and entertained.  And, for the biggest treat of all, I defrosted some "drone brood" for them.

Drone brood, given to me by a bee-keeping friend, consists of bits of honeycomb filled with drone (hence, undesirable) larvae. The hens had never seen it before, and they exclaimed appreciatively at this sudden appearance of insects in the middle of winter.  I'm saving the rest of the brood for Christmas morning.

The four apple trees and the espaliered apricot got their winter "socks"--spirals of white plastic that I wrap around the trunk to keep the rabbits from girdling the bark.  And I wrapped the potted fig tree  in a double thickness of burlap.  The tree is supposed to withstand temperatures of -10F, but I'm not taking any chances.

Then I went to work on Wolfie and Bisou, whose needs were purely cosmetic.  I was clipping their nails, as I do every couple of weeks and, for the first time ever, I nicked the quick on one of Wolfie's. But instead of having hysterics, splattering the room with blood, and never letting me near him with the clippers again, this most tolerant of dogs merely muttered something that sounded like "wow" and let me finish the job.

When the clipping and brushing were done I rewarded the dogs with a walk in the field to eat frozen deer poop.  Speaking of deer, I really should wrap the Leyland cypresses in the backyard in burlap, to keep the deer from eating them.  But they don't actually kill them, and I know the deer have to be terribly hungry to come that close to the house, so I may just leave the Leylands to tough it out.

The wood is stacked on the porch.  The chickens are cozy.  The dogs are groomed.  My only worry now is the black cat that hunts far from the house, at the bottom of the field.  I don't think he has a home.  How is he going to make it through the winter?  There's no way I can lure him to the house, with the dogs around.  I'd leave some food out for him, but I don't know where to put it so he'll know it's there.

Any ideas?

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.

Fig Tree

It's the skinny thing in the black pot behind the watering can, and you can hardly call it a tree, but my heart swells with pride whenever I look at it.

 What am I doing messing with fig trees in Vermont, you ask?  Well, for one thing, this is a "Brown Turkey" fig, bred to withstand temperatures of -10F.  And for another, I have made careful plans to move it to a sheltered spot in the winter, and cover it with a thermal blanket specially made for plants.

I'm probably starting to sound like a member of the sorority that puts sweaters and raincoats and booties on dogs.  But if you've ever tasted a ripe fig still warm from the sun, or even if you've smelled the sugary scent of fig leaves, you know what devotion a fig tree can inspire.

However, the main reason that I couldn't resist this little tree when I saw it in the nursery was the memory of the annual fig tree picnic in the summers of my Catalan childhood.

My grandparents owned some farm land in Castell del Remei, an area that has since become world famous for its vintages, and on this land was a fig tree as big as a house.  I know that objects remembered from childhood tend to shrink when viewed through adult eyes. But I have objective proof of the hugeness of that tree. 

On the day of the picnic, my grandparents, my great-aunt and -uncle, my mother, father, two aunts, an uncle and I would pile into a horse-drawn wagon and make our way on the summer-dusty roads to Castell del Remei and the big fig tree.

Once we got there, the picnic things were unpacked and a fire was started on which to grill tiny lamb chops.  The tablecloth was spread on the ground, the wine poured, the bread sliced.  The horse was unhitched from the cart.  And the ten of us would arrange ourselves around the food and eat and drink and then nap to the sound of the cicadas and the bells from the distant church.

And all of this--the fire and the family, the tablecloth and the wine, the horse and the cart--fit, with room to spare, under the branches of that one fig tree.  

My grandmother would dry the summer's fig harvest on straw mats.  She would spread these out on the terrace and set the figs on them to dry, covering them with fine netting to keep off the wasps and flies.

Months later in Barcelona, in the dark of winter, I would arrive from school one day and find that a basket had come from my grandparents' farm, bearing home-made sausages and blood-puddings, eggs individually wrapped in newspaper and, best of all, a bag of almonds picked and shelled by my grandmother's hands and a tin box full of dried figs.

If you ever find yourself in possession of a good dried fig--not bone-dry, but still leathery and malleable--and you have an almond handy, push the almond pointed-end first into the fig until it disappears, then take a bite.  And you'll know why I put such stock in my little tree.