Winter Dreams

A gardener’s spring begins in winter, in the imagination. And the imagination is a kind companion, forgiving and forgetful, encouraging and enthusiastic. Last year’s failures are recast as character builders and learning experiences. The coming year is still a blank palette. The seed catalogs are spread from hell to breakfast. Ideas loom large but still seem achievable. Pragmatism may win later in the year but now is the time for optimistic indulgence.

And what indulgences! I am actually envisioning a gardening year where I thwart gophers, vanquish deer, redesign plots and finally grow tuberous begonias from seed. Quixotic you say? Well, we’ll see.

Fedco, my mainstay seed company, knows about these rose colored glasses that we don in the dead of winter. This year marks their 30th year of doing business and the catalog ‘s catch phrase reads “30 Years of Spring Fiction.” Extravagant descriptions, gardener’s purple prose, fill the pages and tempt the winter vulnerable to further excesses of ordering.

But honestly, who can resist a winter squash, Sweet Meat, that “grew over the bean trellis, vaulted the 8’ garden fence, and ran off into the woods like kudzu with pies attached.”

Last week's storm

Standing in the eye of autumn’s bluster is an elemental pleasure. Secure in the knowledge that warm shelter is but a few steps away, I can freely breathe the wildness of a coming storm without worrying over finding a place to hunker down and wait out the weather.

In gust after huge exhaling gust, the wind showers me with a whirl of leaves; oak and maple, filbert and persimmon, gingko, dogwood and dove tree spin past me, get caught in air eddies and propel upward and on their way. No demure spring zephyr, the angrier fall wind can strip the leaves in one afternoon.

The gusts, ushering in a chilling rain, calm as suddenly as they began. The temperature drops noticeably; the leafless trees stand still in the brooding air.

In this brief between-time, the wind spent but the rain not begun, I am struck by the now exposed pattern of skeletal branches, from the thick scaffolds to the tiniest twigs far above. It is a fractal echo of leaf veins. The bare limbs reveal patterns within patterns.

The drizzle begins, settling in, a wet cloak under a darkening sky. Time to go in.

Giving thanks

A litany of garden blessings:

Fresh parsley and sage, thyme and rosemary, all in the garden for holiday cooking.

A climate that allows for fresh herbs but still offers the wonders of winter.

My library of garden books to cozy up with in the cold dark time of introspection.

Kale and chard.

Leaf mulch and its complex microcosm.

Clear cold days coinciding with time off to finish putting the garden to bed.

Cockeyed optimism necessary for planting garlic in the face of gophers and deer.

A single leaf hanging at the very top of a bare tree like a silver star.

Rubber boots and warm wool socks.

M’s unflagging willingness to help with the heavy lifting and cheer on even the most harebrained garden ‘innovations’.

Candlegrove.

A garden mostly dead above but teeming with life below.

A clean slate.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

2007 Bean Report

I grew several kinds of beans this last summer. Fresh eating bush varieties included Maxibel, Royal Burgundy and Pencil Pod Wax. I have long wanted to try growing beans for drying and chose Cannellini and Midnight Black Turtle Bean.

Things in the garden rarely go as planned.

The Maxibel, a haricot vert from Fedco, produced lavishly and boasted a remarkable flavor. The catalog cautioned to pick early and often, which is catalog-speak for lousy when over mature, so I harvested the Maxibels rather to the exclusion of the other fresh varieties. This left the wax and purple beans to swell with seeds, a bit of serendipity that gave me a chance to become reacquainted with what my southern raised mother called ‘shelly beans’. I simply couldn’t bear to toss those swollen pods in the compost.

And they are delicious. I found several recipes for a creamy fresh shell bean soup. I was a little leery, though; since the beans from the Pencil Pod Wax were dark I was afraid that the blended soup might turn out mud brown instead of the described ‘jade green’. So I opted for a hearty soup from roasted chicken broth, spinach, noodles, chicken sausage and, of course, a generous amount of shell beans. Yum.

The dried beans are almost ready to harvest. The plants are now permanently covered with reemay as we are firmly into frost season. And only one variety survived. Owing to my touchingly foolish belief that I would remember where each variety was planted I now have no idea which variety I am coddling through the vagaries of a Pacific Northwest fall.

But I like surprises. And it should be easy to tell! No risk of confusing cannellini with black beans.

Next year I will grow only Maxibel for fresh beans. I’ve tried for years to find a great fresh green bean and I think the search is over. And I am so happy to rediscover shell beans and finally try growing dried beans. There is much history for the heirloom bean varieties and I am looking forward to a little winter research into the subject.

Weather observation

I shot this a few days ago. If the adage that a red sky in the morning predicts an inclement day then surely this kind of sunrise must portend an inclement season!

Our autumn weather pattern here in my corner of the PNW usually includes mild days and cool nights with occasional rain showers. This year is shaping up differently. We have had a few storms with high winds followed by chilly rainy days. The weekend was mild but the character of these last storms is more in keeping with our late November storms.

I looked out the window an hour ago and saw rays of watery sunlight shining through red Virginia Creeper, picking out and illuminating droplets of water. Now the sky has darkened and the wind has picked up.

As they say around these parts, "If you don't like the weather wait five minutes".

Metamorphosis

I have celebrated late summer the last several years by searching any milkweed plant I see, hoping to find monarch butterfly eggs or larvae. The last couple of years the search has proved unproductive but this year’s efforts with coworkers yielded two large larvae. These provided another chance to observe the amazing phenomenon of metamorphosis.

The larva does little but eat until ready to pupate. At this point it will begin to wander but eventually will spin a small knot silk on a stem (or another suitable location) and hang with the head curved up. It attaches to the silk with curved hooks on its two hind prolegs. This is called the “J stage” and the larva remains in this stage for about 24 hours.


When the filaments on the head appear very limp it is time to start observing closely.. The skin of the larva starts splitting up the back and the larva gyrates rapidly, all the while remaining attached to the stem, and pushes the larval skin up to where the prolegs are attached to the silk.

At this point the chrysalis is very delicate and the skin must be discarded. In a split second the chrysalis pushes a black postlike cremaster into the knot of silk, twisting to embed the barbed hooks on the end into the silk filaments. It then pulls the hooked prolegs from the silk and flicks the skin away by more vigorous twisting and turning. In 2-4 hours the skin of the chrysalis will harden and it will hang like a green and gold jewel for about 10 days.


During the last day or so the colors of the butterfly’s wings are visible through the clear shell of the chrysalis.


When the butterfly emerges its wings are quite small.


Over the next hour the butterfly will pump fluid into the black veins on the wings and they will expand to full size.



I never tire of watching this miracle.

A thank you to Autumn

What better time to resume posting to this blog than on the day that marks the Autumn equinox ? My calendar tells me that we passed this point at 2:31 this morning.

Changes in Autumn are incremental; the days are shorter by a couple of minutes, the night temperatures slightly cooler, and the shadows a little longer on the tawny hillsides. But taken together the whole seems greater than the sum of the parts.

The garden in Autumn is rich with lessons if anyone cares to listen. Or it can serve simply as a source of comfort. Pulling out spent bean plants can give rise to a meditation on the transitory nature of life. Alternatively, the rhythmic nature of the work, coupled with the warmth of the departing sun and the cool edge to the breeze, can induce what I think of as the gardening trance, a kind of benign mindlessness that has the power to heal.

Whichever mental path I choose, as I go about the business of cleaning and preparing the garden for winter, I win.

Much as autumn changes are small but cumulative, so are the tiny changes in the mental landscape that culminate in the return to center. Months of living out of balance are left behind as I step back on the turning wheel, picking up where I left off as if I had never been gone. The earth cycles move along in that curious duality of stability and transition and my tiny speck of a garden is no exception. It feels good to be back in synch and I am grateful.