I was traveling at both the beginning and the end of November, so I don’t have as much to show from my garden this month. Overall, there was a gradual decline in greenness and growth. November 1 dawned with the first solid freeze of the season. This halted most of the plant growth, but surprisingly not all of it. I was amazed to even have a few tomatoes to harvest mid-month. Things faded a little more every time that the temperatures dipped near or below freezing. Finally temperatures got to the low 20’s at the end of the month and crushed the last of the green out of any remaining tender leaves.
In my garden, I had only a couple accomplishments for the month. I got my garlic planted in my vegetable garden and then I blew all of the fallen leaves around to cover it and my other garden beds. Hopefully the garlic grows happily all winter now that it’s tucked into its bed. In addition to tidying up the leaves, I started my general garden clean up before winter hits, but there’s still plenty more to do.
Temperatures were all over the place in October. We began with days in the 90’s, but things quickly turned colder, and after the first week the lows were consistently forecast to go below 50. That was my signal to bring in my houseplants. Often, this process is really rushed because I like to leave everything out till the last minute, but then the last minute comes unexpectedly and the next thing I know I’m dragging a bunch of plants into the kitchen in the dark after work. This time around, I was able to spend an entire morning giving the plants a little TLC before I brought them inside and found places to put them all. Finding places for them is always a challenge because there are very limited spots inside the house where they will get enough light. Because of that and because they take extra fiddling indoors, I start looking forward to taking them outside again as soon as I bring them in.
Temperatures stayed pretty steady through the middle of the month. Some days were a little warmer and some were a little cooler, but there were no extremely warm or cold days. That meant everything could just keep growing pretty happily–as long as I watered. Our drought continued with hardly any rain to speak of. Leaves gradually started to change. My plants started to crisp here and there as they began to anticipate the end of the growing season.
I picked several rounds of lima beans and got a few more of the fancy blue beans I was trying to grow. Among the limas, I successfully got some very pretty ping zebra beans. I’ve been trying to grow them for a few years without success, but this year I’d read that they simply take a long time to mature. I took the suggestion of starting some plants early indoors, and that did the trick. The blue beans were an experiment that I shouldn’t try again, but it will be tempting to give it a shot. They have an amazing blue color, but only if they mature in cool temperatures. Apparently, temperatures here weren’t cool enough for blue beans until September, so I only got 5-7 blue ones, but those few were pretty spectacular!
I also got an assortment of tomatoes. Every time I enjoy fresh autumn tomatoes in a meal, I think of the guy I passed once at a farmer’s market who was proudly proclaiming that he never eats a fresh tomato after Labor Day because he thinks they’re inferior then. He’s missing out on a couple months of tasty tomatoes!
Things continued along until the final full week of October when temperatures ticked back up into the mid-80’s. Despite the toasty temps, the forecast was to end the month with a serious freeze, so I spent the final weekend of October working to harvest everything I possibly could. We also (finally) got rain, though that made the harvesting more difficult. I was able to harvest my sweet potatoes before the rain started, which made digging through the soil much easier. My harvest was ok, but not nearly as good as last year. The plants had looked healthy, so I’m not sure what happened. I also picked even more lima beans, a few more of the giant zucchino rampicante squash, all my basil, some tomatoes, and some melons that may or may not be ripe.
The zucchino rampicante squash was incredibly happy in my garden this year. I’d gotten three giant squashes from it in September and it was working on several more through October. Unfortunately, quite a few of them had blossom end rot and weren’t usable, but I also got the biggest one of the year that was about 34 inches long. Another had buried itself in my neighbor’s hydrangea plants. A few more of the squashes were still young and tender, so I picked those to eat like zucchini.
I’d hoped to have time to turn all the basil into pesto to freeze for later, but there was too much to do and I wasn’t prepared with enough of the right ingredients, so I decided to grind up the basil with a little olive oil and freeze that. My hope is that it will still be relatively easy to pull out of the freezer and turn into pesto one batch at a time.
Remarkably, the month of November began still with no killing frost or freeze. We came close very early on, so I harvested all the tomatoes I could find along with all of my sweet potatoes. It’s always interesting to see what I have growing underground in the sweet potato patch. The vines looked healthy this year, but did they produce sweet potatoes? The answer was yes! I got a good harvest and can tell that there are several varieties represented in that harvest. Some have orange flesh and some are all purple, but, as in previous years, the best grower was a Japanese variety that has purple skin and dry, white flesh. They’re all tasty.
I’ve been growing the sweet potatoes in a raised bed that contains sandy soil, so to harvest them I just reach my hands into the earth and feel around for the lumps of potato. The whole process is a lot of work, particularly because I have to dismantle my Boo Boo butt shield (aka: the metal hoops covered in bird net to keep the cats out because…you know…sandy soil). I let the sweet potatoes cure for a few weeks and then we roasted some to sample. They were excellent.
That same weekend I also raked up all the leaves on the ground. I wanted to make sure to do it before they started to break apart and smother the grass under them. They were still wonderfully fluffy and colorful when I raked them, which made them much easier to deal with. Normally the leaves would be coming off the trees a little after we had a frost, so I’d just get my leaf blower out and blow the leaves into my garden beds to decompose over the winter. This year, however, everything was still growing when the leaves came down, so I bagged them all up to store temporarily. I’ll spread them on my garden beds as I clear those beds out for the winter. I got 15 big bags of leaves, including some nice maple leaves I raked up from my neighbor’s house!
The cold snap didn’t materialize as early as first expected, but from the forecasts it was certain to arrive in the third week of November, so I picked one final round of lima beans and tomatoes before it hit. For the record, I picked them all on November 11 with weather so pleasant I didn’t need to wear a jacket. Then on November 12 we had a surprise snowfall followed by frigid temperatures. Finally all of the summer’s growth stopped in my garden. Sadly for me, the snowfall occurred on the one day I was out of town visiting friends, so I missed it! Hopefully this won’t be the one and only snowfall of the year, but that’s exactly what happened a few years ago.
In my absence, I told John to take my camera out and capture some images of the snow on top of green, blooming plants. He did, so all the photos below with snow in them are thanks to him. It’s an interesting juxtaposition of still-vibrant plants frozen under snow. The concern that this raises is whether the plants will be damaged by the quick change from temperature highs in the 70’s to a stretch with lows in the 20’s. That other year that I mentioned earlier when the only snow came in November, we had a similar shift in temperature and my plants were damaged because they hadn’t gone through their normally gradual autumnal shutdown. Adding to the potential plant stress this year was the fact that our area’s moderate drought continued into November. In fact, we got only about three-quarters of an inch of rain for the entire month. I tried to counteract this by watering up until the freeze.
After the snow and cold weather finally killed things off, I was able to start clearing this year’s plants out of my garden and start planting for next year. I reworked the soil in my main raised bed for vegetables, adding leaves and stirring things around with a broadfork, then I planted my garlic. The garlic went in a little later than I thought was best, but I’d wanted to get the area cleared and the soil turned and couldn’t do that as easily until things had died back. Time will tell whether it was ok to wait.
Only at the end of the month did the plants finally start to settle back into the earth, with leaves and fruits gradually losing their shapes and colors. Meanwhile, I still had bright, fresh garden tomatoes to enjoy indoors! They’d ripened nicely in a bowl on my counter. It was pretty remarkable to have fresh garden produce at the end of November.
At the start of November, we still hadn’t had any real frost and definitely no deeply freezing weather. That changed soon. On November 1, I went out and picked all my beans because freezing weather was imminent. I got a lot of lima beans, but not nearly as many cowpeas. I need to stop growing cowpeas and start growing more limas in their place because the same pattern has held for several years now.
I thought my cowpeas were doing really well this year, too. Especially the odd ones that looked a lot like lima beans. But it turns out the cowpeas that were growing well were actually limas. They were labeled “black-eyed” and didn’t say pea or bean after that, so I just assumed they were a weird kind of black-eyed pea, even though I noticed the seeds were pretty broad like limas when I planted them. Oh well. Since the real cowpeas didn’t do so well, these limas had plenty of room to expand.
After the beginning of the month, the frosts came repeatedly. First there was a little frost damage here and there. Then a little more. Next the maple trees lost their leaves. Some time later it was the magnolia. Gradually the hosta leaves were edged with yellow, then they were fully yellow.
Finally mid-month the freezes started coming. The hosta leaves gracefully lost their structure and collapsed as the water in their cells burst their rigid cell walls. From here they eased into softly folded fabric. The more severe freeze was also the point when my sweet potato vines finally started to die back and I decided I should harvest the potatoes. I had hoped for a bigger sweet potato harvest, but it really was decent, and we’ll have plenty of sweet potatoes to eat. I planted a sampler mix of three different colors, which will make them even more tasty.
In all of my cleaning and organizing in my garden I spotted several garden spider egg cases and three Carolina praying mantis egg cases. Hopefully that will mean some nice insects next summer. I’d seen several praying mantises around my garden this past summer, but I wasn’t sure whether they were the native Carolina variety or the inasive Chinese mantis that is infamous for killing friendly insects and even hummingbirds. Seeing the egg cases, it looks like I have the native kind.
And this month saw several nice blooms around my garden. The toad lilies kept going until the harder frosts, and the marigolds bloomed until the hard freeze. The zinnias were beautiful even as they were killed off by the cold. And I had some sweet autumn crocuses that I’d planted only a month or two before. They’re the flowers that saffron comes from, though I didn’t attempt to harvest the stigmas.
By the end of the month, everything there was to harvest had been harvested, the dead vines were cleared, and the leaves blown into my garden beds to tuck everything in for the winter. It’s time for things to rest.
October finally saw summer turn to autumn. I started the month by cleaning out the mass of plants in my vegetable garden. By that point, the tomatoes and melons were pretty rough looking. There were several melons to pick, but not many tomatoes anymore. There were also some pretty Klee’s orange marigolds mixed in. Covering it all was a mass of Mexican sour gherkin vines. They’re so cute and fun to grow, but, sadly, I didn’t get inspired to use them in anything this year, so they just grew and grew and never got picked. Next year my garden will be swarming with them because so many unpicked fruits fell on the ground everywhere.
Once the mass of plants was out of the way, I planted my garlic. I always think I have a great new plan for how I can plant garlic so that I’ll be able to plant something else around it in order to maximize the little space I have. But it never works that well. I always get the Small Garden Sampler from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. It’s four different kinds of garlic. This time around, I thought I could plant four rows lengthwise in the raised bed. Surely that would be enough space, right? Well, a couple of the kinds of garlic had lots of small cloves in each head, so there were a lot to plant and they took up more like three rows each. I couldn’t throw any out, so I planted them all and, like usual, hoped something will work out brilliantly next spring. I don’t know what that solution will be, but I’ve got several months before it’s a problem.
Mid month, the overnight temperatures started to regularly be below 50 degrees and that meant it was time to bring in my houseplants for the winter and to harvest my basil. I’d used leaves of the basil here and there all summer, but at the end of the season I always pick everything and turn it into pesto. I made three rounds of pesto and froze most of it. We did use some as the bottom layer on a few pizzas, covering it with fresh mozzarella, pizza cheese, and roasted red pepper. It was delicious!
All month, my garden was brightened with a lot of blooms. Most of them were zinnias and marigolds, but there were also morning glories on the back fence (the kind that come up on their own and not the fancy kinds I planted, not that I noticed (I did)) and tassel flowers by the front bottle tree. I also had pretty blooms from a daisy-like chrysanthemum located by our front steps. You’ll see photos of the flowers here, but not of the plant. It got really leggy and not very attractive. I need to keep working on my mum-growing technique. The last half of the month was time for some of my favorite flowers to bloom–toad lilies. I love how bright, new, and fancy they look just when everything else is getting kind of tired and brown as it coasts into fall.
Toward the end of the month, I tried a project I’d always meant to do: using cement to make casts of big leaves and using those casts as stepping stones. The leaves on my elephant ears are always so beautiful and I’m sad every year when the frosts come. They’re the perfect leaves to turn into stepping stones, and now I can keep them year-round. I made five stones, plus a first one that turned out ok but not great. Next year I may try to add some color to them. For now I’m glad to have finished them before the frost destroyed the leaves (but not long before the frost so the plants didn’t look chopped up for long).
Another project at the end of the month was a round of garden-fresh ravioli. I hadn’t made any ravioli all summer and I decided that that needed to be remedied. Made from scratch, it’s absolutely delicious, but it’s also a lot of work. This time I made it even more work by attempting the fancy, multi-colored pastas that I’ve seen people making on the internet. I needed some natural coloring, so I used the one brightly colored thing I still had in my garden: sweet potato leaves. I cooked the leaves and pureed them and added them into some of the pasta dough to make striped dough. It was a lot tougher to do than they make it appear in internet videos. The pasta was stuffed with a cheesy, garlicy, roasted squash mixture. The squash and garlic were both from my garden. The pasta was served in a brown butter and sage sauce. It was sublime, but took most of the day to make.
Overall, the month was a little dry and quite warm. There were multiple weeks I decided to use my sprinklers to water because we didn’t get nearly enough rain. And our air conditioning was on for a lot of the time while the heat was only on for the last couple days (we tried to engage in the local sport of holding out till at least November before turning the heat on, but we quit when the temperature indoors didn’t get above 62 degrees for the day). There were no frosts and no temperatures near or below freezing, so most of my plants were still going strong at the end of the month.
John and I have been talking about how much we need to take more time off to help us cope with the stress of the pandemic and work. Then I saw a reason to take a long weekend away. There’s a place in Southern Illinois called Scratch Brewing. One of my Facebook friends wrote about visiting it a couple years ago, and I’ve wanted to go there ever since. They use all kinds of locally foraged plants in their brewing. I was intrigued but we never actually went there. Then Scratch’s announcement about their Octoberfest popped into my Facebook feed, and I decided it was time to visit.
We organized a couple days around our visit to Scratch. We found a cabin nearby where we could stay for a couple nights and drove out on a Friday so we could be at Scratch when they opened on Saturday. It was fantastic! The flavors were incredibly complex and layered. Some were surprising. All of them were fantastic. It was a cool, rainy day and was absolutely perfect for sitting in their outdoor dining area sampling all their drinks and eating good food. We spent several hours leisurely drinking and eating. All of it was created with an eye for what’s local. It was SO GOOD, and we can’t wait to go back.
It feels like I spent plenty of time in my garden during the month of September, but I don’t have a lot to show for it. I think most of that time was simply spent watering. It’s been very dry for over a month now, which makes it quite a project to water.
At the start of September, I finally had some zinnias bloom. They were all volunteers from the giant bed of them that I planted last summer. I’d hoped a few volunteers would pop up, and they did. I intentionally left them wherever I saw them and have carefully stepped around them where they’re growing in the middle of my garden paths.
A variety of sunflowers bloomed, though they were strangely short. I didn’t get the seeds in the ground until late this year, so hopefully I’ll get them in the ground earlier and they will have a better time of it next year. They’re such cheerful plants, along with the marigolds that have grown really well this year. They’re also joined along the back fence with cheery Cypress vines and cardinal creeper. I haven’t grown the cardinal creeper for a few years, but I particularly love the jagged shape of its leaves. I’m glad to have it back again.
My sweet potatoes have exploded out of their raised bed. They’re sprawling everywhere and climbing everything. As an added bonus, their pretty purple flowers are decorating everything. I saw on another garden blog that the leaves are edible and can be used in place of spinach in recipes. Since I have such an abundance of leaves, I decided to try it. Of course, I made something super complicated: handmade pasta. I’d seen a recipe for handmade spinach pasta, so I thought it would be interesting to make that but with sweet potato leaves in place of spinach. I picked the leaves, cooked them, added them to the pasta dough, and rolled it into pasta. John and I made a vodka cream sauce using fresh, local tomatoes (I could only find yellow ones, so it’s much more pale than you’d normally expect), and I added a peach cobbler with pecan sandy topping for dessert. It was all tasty, but was also a full day project.
Through the month, all the plants slowly got browner and crispier, despite my weekly watering efforts. I was particularly disappointed that the cowpeas were among the first to dry up. They hadn’t produced many beans before they did. They were another set of plants that I got into the ground later than I would have liked. I continued to have a few tomatoes, despite the rough-looking plants, and more of the little Mexican sour gherkins that look a little like tiny watermelons. I also had plenty of basil.
By the end of the month, my garden has definitely reached the point where it’s ready to be finished for the summer. The plants are crispy and increasingly brown, despite my efforts to keep them watered. They look tired, and I feel tired, so I think we’re all ready for a little wintertime dormancy.
If you’ve been following along, you might remember that October was unusually warm. Then came November. The first frost came on November 1. It was cold enough to begin to affect the plants. It warmed, then we went into a deep freeze of polar air and temperatures were in the teens with wind chills in the single digits. Then came snow. Then more warmth. Then cold.
All of these cycles altered my garden through the month of November. If you look through the photos below, you may recognize the same plants appearing repeatedly through the month. The green slowly bleaches away. The yellows descend from the trees onto the ground. Everything falls in on itself and flattens to the earth.
The changes are most evident among the hostas and variegated Solomon’s seal. I love the patterns and colors of the collapsing hosta leaves in particular. Their distress is beautiful. I also like the patterns in the oval scales of all the magnolia leaves on the ground as well as their mixture of greens and tans.
You can also see the progress of the ice and cold in my sweet potato bed. The first frost at the start of November did some damage, but the plants kept going until the deep freeze did them in. After things thawed again I decided to check for sweet potatoes and I was pleasantly surprised to find some. The plants had gone in late, so the potatoes weren’t large, but they look good. I’ll be eating them soon. They were an experiment, but they did so well in the limited time they had that I plan to grow them for real next year.
There’s always a week in fall when everything is the most beautiful, golden color, and this year that happened mid November. The snow came at the very end of this week, making gorgeous golden-white landscapes. I like fall snows because the colored foliage shines through the snow in interesting ways.
And, the cats.
I worried about the boys outside when the temperatures were set to plummet. There are plenty of places nearby for them to hide, and the guys who were outside last winter made it through a few Arctic blasts, but I decided to add more to their winter options. I bought two heated outdoor cat houses. Spike, the older gent with one tooth, moved into one immediately. I’d suspected as much. He now spends most of his day inside it.
He is always letting the other outdoor cats know he’s the boss, so he made sure he had the cat house to himself from the start. I hadn’t anticipated, however, that he would keep everyone else away from the second house. For a long time, they chose to sit ON it and not IN it. Or they slept in the more exposed cat bed in a box nearby. It wasn’t until December and over a month of this ridiculousness that I flipped open the second roof so it wasn’t so tightly enclosed and a couple of the other guys settled in.
Perry hasn’t gotten to go on walks very often now that it’s getting dark so early. We’re trying to keep him occupied with indoor play and clicker training. Overall, his behavior has improved dramatically in the 2+ years we’ve had him…but there’s so much further he needs to go.
The girls are perfectly lovely. Late November Lady Morgaine confirmed that winter is truly here–she started sitting on her heated cat bed on the window sill again. The girls also started sleeping curled up together at night to stay warmer. They’re super cute when they do, which is good because they take up half the bed.
It’s mid-December, and I’ve been to a variety of places in the past several weeks. At home, my garden has slowly been going further and further into dormancy. The previously frozen flowers and leaves are drying, their color fading further to brown.
I got my final harvest mid-November. I’d attempted some fall greens and a few came up. I needed the space to plant my garlic, though, so I picked the greens and some small garlic shoots that had been growing all summer from discarded garlic cloves. The greens and garlic leaves made a delicious fried rice. The garlic that I planted in the space they vacated will grow all winter and spring and will be ready to harvest sometime around next June.
The day after Thanksgiving, I ended up in my hometown of Archbold, Ohio for their 20th annual Festival of Lights Parade. In case you have never seen a parade in a small Midwestern town, they usually include a wide array of farm implements plus fire, rescue, and police vehicles from as many surrounding areas as possible. Archbold puts a twist on it by holding their parade after dark and requiring everything to be coated in lights.
The last time I saw a Festival of Lights Parade, someone had even covered the village’s septic sucker in lights. I was disappointed that there was only a minimally lighted garbage truck this year, but the Archbold Fire Department did go all out by installing a smoking chimney on the back of their big ladder truck. Of course, there was also the Sterlina the Cow with a nicely lit wreath around her neck.
It was good to be back for the parade after many years. Nothing rings in the Holidays like some lighted farm implements.
After Thanksgiving with my family, I traveled to Columbus, Ohio to do an arts residency. I’ll write more about that on my art blog, but here I’ll say that I need to remember to schedule residencies only when the days are longer. By the time I was finished teaching at the school every day, I only had about an hour of daylight left, so I didn’t get to see much of the city.
I did fit in a visit to the Franklin Part Conservatory, however. Their interior had some special plants and lighting for the holidays and they had special light displays in their exterior gardens. I could appreciate some of the exterior lights, but the display I most wanted to see was not turned on yet. It was in the Japanese garden, and the printed descriptions made it sound like there would be projections on the white fabric banners I saw suspended in the space. They were still interesting to look at, though. I was sad that I was just a couple days too early for the Conservatory’s evening hours.
After I got home from my art residency, John and I made sure to go out and get a Christmas tree. As is the tradition at Patchwork Central, we drove out to some reclaimed strip mine land and cut an Eastern red cedar. In the past, someone from our group would get the proper permits and training, but now it’s just John and I getting a tree, so we simply dash in and grab one before anyone notices.
The scarred land is beautiful with scattered cedars everywhere, brown grasses, and small ponds. Over the years, John and I have learned that trees look a lot smaller while growing in a field than they do when indoors. In the past we’ve come home with some giants that needed every inch of our 12′ ceiling heights.
The first tree John found looked great…until I realized that it was at least twice his height. We kept searching and found another very pretty specimen that wasn’t much taller than John. Perfect!
Once home, we soon had it decorated. It’s the first time the Ladies have been around a Christmas tree, so we weren’t sure what to expect. The only time they showed any interest was when I first brought out the lights. Once Lady Ygraine completed her lighting investigation, both Ladies went back to pretty much ignoring the tree.
I was a little puzzled by some hanging clumps among the branches. At first, I thought they were insect related, but I couldn’t pull them off so I thought they were part of the tree. They looked great as part of the decorations, but I decided I’d better do a little Googling. Turns out they are cocoons for moth larva. Ick. They’re gone now.
And speaking of the cats, they are all enjoying their warm and cozy life indoors and they are repaying us in cuteness. The outdoor interloper who John and I have nicknamed McBalls continues to stir things up for our three indoors. Lady Morgaine continues to love her heated cat bed. And, Perry is still a huggy, bitey mess.
Squirrels and Tomatoes 