December 2023: Wrapping Up Another Year

December brought quiet beauty in the muted colors of the remaining leaves. With so many browns everywhere, the remaining greens, yellows, oranges, and reds really popped. The color bled out of the last of the hosta leaves, leaving them collapsed, pale, and skeletal. The heuchera leaves remain colorful as they sit tucked into the leaves fallen around them. And the blackberry leaves are some of the most tenacious, turning both darker and more golden before they will eventually fall away.

I didn’t really work on anything in my garden in December, even though there is still some clean up to do. Instead, I put up my outdoor Christmas lights, and John and I got a Christmas tree. Again this year we got a commercial tree that had been farmed in Northern Indiana. I believe that the days of our stripper pit Christmas trees are probably gone, sigh. Still, the tree we got was tall and skinny and perfect for our house, so we were happy with it.

Another December project was making some new cat houses for the outdoor cats. I always worry about keeping them warm enough in winter. Ever since our first winter with outdoor cats hanging around I’ve had some insulated cat houses with built-in electric heating pads, but Spike has claimed them all and does not share. A couple years ago I made a couple cat shelters using plastic tubs for Mark and Junior. But all of these shelters seem drafty to me and I’m doubtful that they’re enough to keep the chill wind out.

So this year I decided to upgrade to Feralvillas, which are ready-to-assemble cat shelters that some people make in a small shop. I ordered them online, they arrived quickly, and they were super easy to assemble. The cats enter the Feralvilla on a lower level and from inside they can move to an upper level that is enclosed, sheltered from the wind, and completely insulated. I anticipated that cats would be cats and would show me who’s boss by waiting to use these nice things I’d gotten for them, but the cats were using them the first night that they were available. They must be good. I got one for each cat, and the cats appear to have sorted out whose house is whose.

April 2023: Greening Again

My garden really began to green up and fill out in April. Plenty of things had already begun to emerge from the ground in March, but the blooms and leaves really started to pop in April. You can get a sense of the progression of things in the photos below.

In April, the redbud ended its blooms and added its ever-lovely heart-shaped leaves. Multiple kinds of ferns sent tendrils out of the ground to unfurl in a multitude of sculptural ways. Epimediums sent their delicate, fairy-flower blooms up above new leaves that later spread to catch raindrops. Astrilbe leaves emerged with delicately-cut, feathery edges. Young wild ginger and hardy begonia leaves shimmered almost glittery when the sunlight hit them. My favorite bright orange tulips exploded across the garden under the maple tree. The irises were began their show. New growth and bright colors were everywhere. The one exception, though, were the azaleas out front that are missing a lot of their leaves after the unusually cold weather at Christmas. Time will tell if the bushes recover. They still managed to put on a nice show of color, but they promise to look very bare once the flowers fall.

Meanwhile in my vegetable gardening, the garlic powered onward in both of my main vegetable beds. I’m hoping I can find ways to fit other vegetables around it before it’s ready to harvest in June. I started some lettuce in a couple other beds, but it grew very slowly, so it’s also still taking up space at a time when I had hoped it would be grown and picked. My sweet potato, tomato, melon, and squash starts are growing nicely indoors and are past ready to go out, but are destined to fit around the garlic and lettuce.

May will bring much more planting and new plants in the spaces that April created.

November 2022: Final Harvests

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.

April 2022: Spring Unfurls like a Fern

It’s amazing to see the changes that took place in my garden during the month of April!

The month began with the earliest blooms, which were mostly crocuses, still happening around my garden. The ground in my garden beds was still predominantly brown with some tufts of new green scattered here and there. By the end of the month, I was enjoying a riot of color and too many shades of green to count. The mid-spring blooms, including most of the daffodils, came and went, and we had moved on to the late spring bloomers like the tulips, tiarellas, and irises. By the end of the month, my garden beds were fully carpeted in lush, rich greens, and it felt like my garden was singing.

To get from the start to the finish, so much needed to unfurl from the earth. It all began small and compact before growing rapidly and expanding to quickly fill the available space. The process is pretty incredible to watch. You can see it happening in the photos below. If you flip through them, you’ll see the same plants getting bigger and broader through the month. You can also see the more short-lived flowers pop up and then disappear. Some of my favorites are the ferns whose tightly curled fronds make beautiful and interesting shapes.

I tend to feel like the end of April through the end of May is the best time in my garden. June brings heat with it, and the plants feel like they begin to shrink back a little in order to conserve their moisture. That, and my vegetables tend to get too big and too messy about then. Till then, everything will stay on the upswing of expansion and bright greens of new growth.

December 2021: The Final Shades of the Year

December was quiet in my garden. I moved around a few more leaves but that was about all I did all month. All the plants pretty well finished settling back into the earth for the winter. Slowly the last pops of vibrant color drained away. At first glance, the photos of my garden from the start and end of the month look the same, but on further examination you might be surprised at the things that were left to fall away as the month progressed. The blackberries were the last plants to have their leaves turn color and drop. I love their colors darkening from yellows into reds and purples.

We did some good cooking in December (though we cook well every month!). Early in the month we made acorn squash stuffed with Beyond Burger, veggies, and breadcrumbs. The squashes were not from my garden, but they were local. They tasted amazing and 100% like they contained actual meat. We don’t normally cook with Beyond Burger, but we had some on hand and this was a great way to use it.

On Christmas Eve we made Smoking Bishop, a British mulled wine drink mentioned at the end of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. One of the most interesting parts of the recipe was that you roasted citrus fruits in the oven before putting them along with some other spices into some port and heating the whole thing up. It was tasty! Apparently it’s called Smoking Bishop because it’s the color of bishops’ robes and the steam rising off of it looks a little like smoke. (I was inspired to try making it after watching this video.)

I didn’t include a photo, but we did cook up some of my garden produce, too. Our Christmas meal included some of my sweet potatoes roasted.

And I decorated for Christmas! It always looks cheery. I hate to take the outdoor lights down in January knowing we’ll have a few more dreary months to go. I’ve had solar lights on my bottle tree/stump all year, and I thought I’d leave them up for Christmas, but then I saw a photo of the tree last year with real Christmas lights on it. The non-solar lights were so much brighter and really made the bottles sparkle, so I decided I needed to switch out the solar lights for some higher-powered ones for Christmas. I was not disappointed.

And finally, you’ll notice we have a more conventional Christmas tree this year. John and I normally go to a secret spot on strip mine land and grab a cedar. People from Patchwork have been getting their trees that way (though usually with official permits) for nearly a half century (yikes!), but this year when John and I arrived at the spot we knew it wasn’t going to work. It was like the gates leading to Brigadoon had disappeared. There was no route to the clearing where we’ve found our trees over the last many years, despite multiple passes down the road where we knew it should be. And it looked like things were being actively mined again. Without a permit, it felt like a really bad idea to stop, so we didn’t.

We ended up getting a nice tree from a local tree farm. The tree farm’s trees weren’t big enough to cut yet, but they’d gotten several pre-cut trees from a big tree farm in Northern Indiana. I felt a little like one of the people in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special who choose the fancy trees instead of the scraggly little one. The one we got has even been dyed a little bit to ensure a nice, green appearance. Oh well. It was the right choice this year.

November 2021: Rapid Changes

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.

April 2021: The Greening Returns, part 2

A short time ago, WordPress updated all of the behind-the-scenes stuff for the blogs it hosts. It’s been a little bit of an adjustment for me. There are new ways of doing everything and a lot of my old ways of doing things are gone. So, I wasn’t exactly surprised when I went back to look at my last post about my garden and I realized that several photos were missing. I guess WordPress decided I had enough photos in my post and it cut me off!

I’d spent time choosing, editing, uploading, and labeling them all, so I didn’t want to just delete them. So, now you get a few bonus April photos from the end of the month.

April 2021: The Greening Returns

I’m a little later than I’d like in putting together my review of all the things that happened in my garden in April. Part of the problem was that I had a lot of photos to sort through. All month, plants were growing, expanding, and blooming. I’d catch a great color combination or combination of leaf textures one morning, and then by the evening the colors would have shifted or the shapes would have changed and it was a whole new and beautiful thing to see.

At the start of the month, the green had definitely begun to return to my garden. March had seen the emergence of all kinds of plants and several rounds of early blooms, so April was marked by a lot of expansion among my perennials and the later spring blooms. You’ll see that happening in the set of photos below. As always, you can click on any photo for a caption with more information about what you’re looking at.

The month started with unfurling ferns of all sorts, plus fritillaries, tulips, tiarellas, grape hyacinths, my later daffodils, and epimedium. When everything is so small and delicate, I imagine lots of fairies stopping by. For vegetables, I’d started a few tomato seeds indoors at the end of March and I had some lettuce outdoors that I’d tried to get going last fall. The lettuce didn’t do much until this spring, but I cut at least three rounds of salads off of it before cutting it down in May and starting some fresh greens.

The redbud tree our front put on its usual show all month. I love its progression from buds to full blooms that make the branches look zig-zaggy then the emerging, heart-shaped leaves changing to full-sized hearts. By the end of the month the perennials had expanded to fill their usual spots and the irises and azaleas were blooming.

Like I said before, April is always a very pretty month with many changes and lots to see!

December 2020: Muted Festivities

December felt more muted than usual. John and I did several of our usual things to prepare for Christmas, but left behind several other things because we were just too tired. I’d put up my outdoor Christmas lights in November, and we got our tree mid-December. We went on our traditional tree-gathering expedition to old strip mine land. For decades it’s been a Patchwork tradition. For many years, there was a sizeable group that would go, and they’d get official permits and everything. Now it’s just John and I and we simply try to stay out of the “No Trespassing” zones. We got a nice tree and have enjoyed its festiveness, even if we didn’t really do gifts to go under it this year. 

December finally brought several good freezes to my garden. The first one came very early in the month, and it was thanks to it that I discovered an errant squash buried in one of my neighbor’s hydrangea bushes. I hadn’t noticed it until the last of the leaves on the bushes finally froze and fell. I was very excited to have one more! On the same day I found the squash,  discovered a cluster of lima beans that I’d also missed before. They turned out to be the ping zebra variety that I’d thought had completely failed to produce. This was the second year I’d attempted them, seemingly with no results. They’re very pretty beans, so I was sad not to get any. Now I think maybe they just take a little longer to produce beans and I’m not giving them enough time to grow before the frosts come.

Also in December, my sweet potatoes finished their curing and we started eating them. They’ve starred in a couple rounds of roasted root vegetables and a stew. We’re looking forward to using them more in January. There are at least three varieties including a fun purple one. And on New Year’s Eve I tried making English muffins for the first time. I’ve been trying to be really intentional about spending additional time with Perry the cat, so he and I watch YouTube videos before bed most nights (John also takes turns). We’ve watched several cooking shows, and I was intrigued by the dry frying method that you’re supposed to use to make English muffins. I borrowed a giant electric skillet to do the job, and they turned out pretty good, though there’s room to improve with more practice. We ate the English muffins with smoked salmon and a side of locally-grown kohlrabi for our New Year’s Eve supper.

And there have been some nice, photographic moments in my garden thanks to the cold weather. The hosta leaves and marigolds are always beautiful as they fade away into the earth. The blackberry leaves are always some of the last to fall off the plants, and they go through a kaleidoscope of colors before they do. And, we got a dusting of snow on Christmas morning to add a little more festivity to the day. Mark the cat did his part to demonstrate that it was an official accumulation: there was enough snow for him to leave prints.

We didn’t travel anywhere or see family or friends in person over the holidays. We had a chance to talk to everyone on video chats, so at least there was that. It’s not really the same, though, so it was a season of missing friends and family. It’s discouraging to be past the holidays now and to be facing several dark, cold, monotonous months of unceasing pandemic. Soon it will be time to take my Christmas lights down, which will be a little more sad this year, but hopefully I’ll find new bits of light and hope around me in my garden.

November 2020: Slowly Relaxing Back into the Earth

At the start of November, my garden had yet to be touched by frost, although we had had several chilly nights where the temperature flirted with freezing and below. So, most of my plants, even the more cold sensitive ones, were still growing though with plenty of touches of fall color in their leaves.

My elephant ears, which are quite cold sensitive, have had a very good year and got very large. They just barely survive in the ground here from year to year, and only then it’s because they’re in a very protected spot. I was amazed that they are so well protected that they lasted all the way through the month of November with their big, showy leaves still on display.

Another remarkable bright spot for the month was the hearty geranium plant in the garden on the east side of the house. I’ve thought about planting one for several years, and now I’m sad I didn’t do it sooner. It produced beautiful, brilliant purple flowers all the way through November. They glowed against the brown leaves.

My garden began November with golden leaves still on the trees, but by the end of the month the trees were all bare, the leaves were on the ground, and I’d blown them over my garden beds like a blanket. You’ll notice that process slowly taking place in the photos from the month. Also across all the photos below, you’ll notice more and more yellows and reds creep into the leaves before browns start to join them. You’ll notice one pretty hosta leaf that began with a nice variegated green color before its outer margins slowly turned deeper and deeper shades of caramel and then the leaf began to completely collapse in on itself.

By the month’s end, things had mostly begun to collapse into the ground, even though the month came and went without a deep, killing freeze. At the start of the last full week of November, my sweet potatoes finally got a frost that killed most of their leaves, so at that point I harvested the potatoes.

The kids at Patchwork always get super excited when they harvest sweet potatoes there, and I thought understood that: it’s fun to dig around and find buried treasure! Last year was my first one growing sweet potatoes in my garden, but I got them in late and they didn’t have a chance to make many potatoes. I was happy enough with them that I planted more sweet potatoes this year. However, this year’s harvest was something different: there were so many! I’d think I’d found them all, but then they just kept going! I’d move over just a little bit and there were even more! I got the shovel out to help me, but immediately it sliced through two potatoes and destroyed them, so I put it away and knelt on the ground and dug around with my hands. It was like some reality TV show challenge, but in the end I got a bunch of sweet potatoes. They just finished curing, so now I need to figure out what to make.

In other culinary highlights from the month, my birthday came early on and John and I celebrated with steaks with a side of fresh lima beans from my garden. Later in the month I cut up the first of the butternut squash from my garden and made mac ‘n cheese using a great recipe that includes lots of squash in the cheese sauce. Later in the month I got really daring and used the second squash to make filled pasta from scratch. I made the pasta dough and then a filling of roasted squash with sage and cheese, and then I rolled the dough, stuffed the filling into it, cooked the pasta, and made a browned butter and sage sauce with toasted walnuts. It was a very long process, but the food turned out to be amazing. I only started experimenting with homemade pasta this summer, but I’m really liking the results! And for Thanksgiving, we had locally sourced turkey and some sweet potatoes from Patchwork’s garden (since my sweet potatoes still needed to cure for a few more days).

Oh, and as you look through the photos you’ll see a very large building going up across the alley from us. It will be an affordable housing complex. Hopefully it turns out ok. It’s really big and really imposing as you walk down the alley. Apparently the lot behind us wasn’t the top pick for locations for this apartment block, but several other options didn’t work out so they went with this one. It seems like a lot crammed onto not a lot of space, but Evansville desperately needs more affordable housing so apparently it came down to either building in this location or the project wasn’t going to happen at all.