Time is Getting Short

The sun is rising later and setting sooner all the time now. The cat comes and wonders at me what's going on when it's dark and I have not yet put him to bed.

One of these days we will have to fire up the wood stove again. We notice that the masonry beneath it and on the hearth has cracked. We may have put too much soapstone on the top last year, trying to capture the heat in the living room a little longer.

The garden looks wistful. Of course it is the time of year when the white rose bush puts out its third crop of blooms-- they grow on the tips of stems that grew long and rangy when I pruned it back a couple of months ago. We have seen roses on that bush at Christmas time! It's an amazing thing -- old, and so productive. The base of the plant is like a bonsai-- tortured looking and mis-shapen. Some sort of canker has tried to kill it in the past, but it just keeps living on and flourishing. Amazing.

Fall is a good time. It's really like a beginning, in many ways. You get out different clothing and linens and fold up the bathing suit. You find pockets of dust "bops" where you have not been for a long time. You clean up as you go. It feels good to see a change inside as well as outside.

The chipper duty is a pleasure in this season. And the little woodchip path is growing slowly as the piles of brush are receding. I can see that the forest floor is going to be lovely and calm where we have cleared it a little. There's a tree out there in the woods -- just a simple narrow Juniper like tree with very prickley needles and only about ten feet tall. Very pointy. I have let it be known that I would like a set of solar Christmas lights to put on that tree. I think it would be magical to have a little tree with lights appear out in the woods. Neighbors would be able to see it out their back windows. Wouldn't the children love it? (This child would.)

Right now it's getting light outside and another day will begin with us struggling with our uprooted computer files and the current project. Coordinating with "offices" next to each other for this project, instead of in different rooms. Setting some conventions for working -- how to say in a nice way that you shouldn't be interrupted just now. Maybe a little "IN CONFERENCE" sign to put up?

Tomatoes are not coming in droves as they did last summer, so I will not have to frustrate myself about much boiling and freezing, etc. I will miss the yummy stuff we had so much of last year in the freezer: juice, stewed tomatoes, puree, soups. It's all right though-- I have plenty to do. Maybe this will be the year for typing and not so much cooking?

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Ode to the First Cherry Tomato

Hiding under a goodly bunch of foliage is a bract that I've been watching for weeks-- the first of the yellow blossoms dried back to show hard dark green balls about the size of bb's. They stayed pretty much the same for so long, and then began to widen out. So dark green.

I decided that a watched tomato doesn't ripen, so to speak, and ignored these things, watching instead for signs of productive behavior on the Brandywine plants that were growing large and bushy.

Today I see about five billiard ball sized dark green globes forming on my Brandywine bushes. They are a "beefsteak" tomato, so it will be a while before they grow to size and get that transparency that tells you that ripening is just beginning to happen.

Meanwhile, in the past two days, that first bract of the Cherry Tomatoes has produced three round finished products. They showed themselves off proudly under their lacy greens and now we have properly harvested, hoisted, celebrated and consumed them while standing next to the plant. I popped that first fruit, warm from the sun, into my mouth, bit down slowly on the taut shiny red outer skin and felt the luscious innards burst inside my mouth-- too flavorful and sweet to describe.

This time of year I remind myself that in a month or so I will be truly suffering under the weight of too many tomatoes. They will be coming too fast to ever eat, and what I can't give away to neighbors I will have to process in some way. Throwing away lovingly grown tomatoes is not an option. So in August I'll be out there in the back yard (not to heat up the kitchen) in the sun and humidity boiling ripe tomatoes, chilling them in ice water, and peeling off the skins of hundreds of these things. The only thing keeping me from wishing the whole mess gone is the certainty that what goes into the freezer in August comes out of the freezer through the winter months and gives us such pleasure.

I figured out that you can throw peeled and seeded ripe tomatoes into a slow cooker with a few other ingredients and they cook themselves into a stew that is "to die for." You can dump the stew into freezer zip bags and lay them into bread pans to freeze.. Then you take back the bread pans and stack the blocks in the freezer. There's puree and tomato juice and homemade "V8"; and I can even chop up fresh seeded tomatoes, add a bit of lemon juice, and stick them in the freezer as long as I am going to use them cooked later. These chunks of red get thrown into stews and soups and gravies all winter long.

Jersey tomatoes. There really is nothing like them. Nothing!

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Pre-Tomato Time

There's a time each summer when there are tomatoes on the plants but they are sort of a transparent green color with no clue of red showing. There are a couple of bracts on my cherry tomato plants that have been that way for about a week. They keep growing in circumference, but I would like them to just stay cherry-size and color up! Should I pick up those pricey numbers in the store this week, or hold out and make lettuce and onion salads with marinated cucumbers and eschew buying tomatoes starting now?

For that matter, there are lots of prickly cucumbers getting beyond finger-size on the vines planted in my blue plastic all-purpose bucket with rope handles. (Last year I planted melons in this bucket with good success. Spray painted a bit of red and green paint over the bright blue sides and installed plastic lattice around the back . We got maybe ten luscious canteloupes-- and yes it was worth the trouble. Not only were the fruits beyond delicious, but the display they made against the house was elegant. )

I sort of cheated the flower garden this year. My hollyhocks have gradually thinned down to two plants-- and they are not very happy for some reason. I did not break the bank on impatiens this time. Each summer there are more volunteers from last year's garden, so I found impatiens springing forth under the pine trees in later summer. I see that my Bishop's Children (Dahlias) have reproduced themselves and made up for the ones I found and lifted in the fall. It is not enough to store bulbs in our shed for overwintering. Even insulating them with row cover blankets is not enough to keep them hydrated enough in the dry cold of winter. I found a wealth of dessicated dahlias when I hopefully pulled them out in early spring.

One of the things about flower gardens is that if you have enough perennials planted as a sort of skeleton for the annuals to adorn, you still have a garden even if the annuals are sparse. Spirea, Rhodies, Crysanthemums, Heather, Astilbe, Roses, Day Lilies, Stargazers, Glads, Phlox, and happy volunteers from last year are standing tall and happy out there.

So.. should I buy tomatoes today? I guess so-- and some more of that imported pre-corn that is about a 8.5 right now. South Jersey really does deserve bragging rights about their own tomatoes, corn-- oh, and those "leaners" you slurp up in peach season.

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