Big Wind

A strange kind of autumn has arrived.  The wind blew for 24 hours, the first rain in weeks drenched the gardens, and now the ground is covered with twigs and branches and many, many leaves--green leaves wrenched untimely from their homes, leaves that will not turn red or orange or gold in October.  It's long-sleeve weather, sock-and-boot weather, put-away-the-fans weather.

The little dog is Bisou, but I have no idea who the long-haired woman is

They Call The Wind Mariah....

It sprinkled rain on and off all day yesterday. Around six p.m. I heard some thunder and asked my husband if he thought we'd get some significant rain, and he said "Naah."

Ten minutes later a wind from the north came roaring up, the air turned a strange shade of gray, and the rain came down in buckets. By the time it was over:

a patio chair was in the pond,
the patio umbrella had been snapped in two,
my formerly proud peppers, chard and kale were bowed to the ground,
the upstairs floors (where we had left the windows open one inch) had to be mopped,
the garden cart was in the woods, 75' from where I had left it.

This morning we finished filling the second raised bed with topsoil, added compost, and I planted beans. They should be ready for picking by late September, and with luck, we'll make it. The beans are the last planting of the 2010 vegetable garden. Everything else is already producing. We've been eating tomatoes; the banana peppers are lengthening and thickening; the zucchini are converting dirt into food at an amazing speed; even the reluctant eggplants are setting fruit. As for the kale and chard, I picked four pounds of the stuff for the food bank today and you can't even tell they've been harvested.

All this on nine 4'x4' squares. There's nothing like intensive gardening!

Spinach In A Gale

It rained all day yesterday, that gentle rain from heaven that was keeping gardeners indoors recovering from their labors. And that is what I would have been happy to do except that I happened to look out the window at the garden and see, to my horror, that the spinach had gotten so big it was starting to look like rhubarb. And some of the leaves were getting those pointy ends that herald the bolting of the crop.

There was nothing for it: I would have to go out and harvest the spinach immediately if I wanted a good supply of vitamin A next winter.

In between showers I marched out with two big baskets and a huge stainless-steel bowl. The grass was soggy, and the wooden boards that constitute the paths between the vegetable beds were slippery. I crouched down and started picking.

You know how spinach leaves are, all crinkly? Every one of those crinkles was full of rainwater, and pretty soon I was drenched up to my elbows. And that is when the wind picked up, heralding a cold front.

It came whistling in from the west, shifted to the north, spiraled west again, then south and east. I tried to position myself between the wind and the basket of spinach, but every time the wind would shift it would blow half the crop out of the basket. I ended up keeping one arm, fingers spread, pressed down on top of the spinach in the basket, and picking with the other.

I eventually made it back into the house, the spinach beds looking suitably diminished. Now I had a mountain of spinach in my hands, to be processed while all its nutritional virtues were still intact.

This is when I wish I had an industrial-size kitchen, with tub-sized sinks, and a half dozen helpers, one to wash, one to drain, one to keep the water boiling. One to keep putting ice in the cooling bowl, one to drain again, one to fill and label the freezer bags and one to take them down to the freezer in the basement. I guess that makes seven. I wish I had seven helpers.

But instead I did it all myself. My mountain of spinach shrank down to ten small freezer bags. Then I went to yoga and spent the entire class breathing “into” my aching back.