On a recent morning Sophie & I harvested potatoes, pumpkins, tomatoes, apples, and winter squash.

As all things change in the autumn gardens, there is one constant…..

MayMay.

MayMay to the right.

MayMay to the left.

MayMay joined to Sophie’s hip.

MayMay inspecting every potato. She is everywhere we want to be!
Today, Sophie and I are off to mulch the main vegetable garden with mulch hay. At the door, ever ready is….

who else but MayMay.

Saturday saw us happily exploring Emily’s new world in Lewiston, Maine. This meant we were not home when a couple of men from Taylor Farm came up to deliver the 100 bales of mulch hay I asked to have delivered.

If you have read this blog for long, you already know how passionate I feel about mulch. This 100 bales of hay was already earmarked for the garden where Sophie and I had harvested the Red Shiso.

Anyways, Saturday was about the only day since the beginning of June that I wasn’t here to direct a delivery of mulch to the usual spot. The particular Taylors that came to deliver the bales hadn’t left mulch hay here before. It’s usually been Bill Taylor or one of his brothers that delivers. This time, the hay got stacked four bales high in a neat square on top of my new asparagus bed. Asparagus needs mulch. Doesn’t everything? But not that much! Reluctantly, I called Bill on Sunday morning to tell him that the hay wasn’t in the normal place.

He was astoundingly nice about it and came right up with his front loader to move the bales. Jim, aka project man, got down from the roof where he was cleaning our chimney and helped Bill move the pile. The transfer went quickly, thanks to ever cheerful, easy going Bill’s skill with his front loader. Soon half the hay bales were on the main vegetable garden for Sophie and me to spread this week and the other half were stacked nearby.

Then Bill did something that made me weep with gratitude. He turned my compost piles with his front loader.

I have known Bill and Liz, his darling wife, for thirty years. This means I met them when Bill was a tow-headed ten year old and Liz was the nine year old girl growing up across the street from Taylor Farm. Folks in town were always saying they couldn’t tell Bill and his brother Jim apart, but they didn’t have the same face at all and I never got why people said that. Perhaps it was just that the Taylor boys were ever on the go and all people saw of them was the flash of their blonde heads as they did the millions of jobs sons on a dairy farm traditionally do; haying, haying, and more haying.

We didn’t see much of Bill and Liz during their teenage years though we did have the occasional flash of a blonde head as Bill hayed our seven acre hay field. Then we heard that Bill was out of college and planning to keep Taylor Farm going with his dad and his brother Jim. Next, we were delighted to learn that Liz and Bill were getting married. We were so happy to be invited to the wedding.

It was one of my favorite weddings ever. The minister, our good neighbor Malcolm Grobe, had been Liz and Bill’s fifth grade teacher. He had wonderful funny anecdotes about Liz and Bill to share, but beyond this humor, his words had a quality of resonance and heart reflecting all his years knowing and loving Liz and Bill and their families. At the wedding, most everyone knew both the groom’s and the bride’s sides of the family because so many of us were from Meriden. This added to the timeless, deeply grounded feeling of the ceremony. The day was a sleepy hot summer day and Liz looked so beautiful. Everyone, including the bride and groom, walked from the church service to the reception down Main Street. It was everything I liked about living in a small town.

Liz and Bill’s first child was born the same year as our Will and the two boys have been friends for all these years. Liz and Bill built a house on our road and part of Taylor Farm moved to their backyard. Will and Jeffrey have a trail between our houses that runs by the Taylor’s lovely swimming pond. The trail gets more and more traffic as the boys get older.

When Jeffrey and Will were babies, I was lucky enough to have Liz work part time at Green Hope Farm. Reminders of her sparkling presence still fill our office. From here Liz went to work for her dad in the family smokehouse. Just this year Liz and Bill have bought the smokehouse ( www.Garfieldsmokehouse.com) from Liz’s family. They now sell their smoked cheese, smoked bacon, smoked hams, and Taylor Brother’s Maple Syrup at local stores, farmstands, farmer’s markets, from their shop in Meriden village, and on the internet. Nowadays, when Liz and I watch our boys play soccer, we often talk about things like snafus with UPS and the grace of a good staff.

So yesterday when Bill graciously moved the hay, he was already a much appreciated fixture in our lives. But after he organized my messy piles of compost into two extraordinarily well turned piles, I revered him as an immortal. How deft he was with that front loader. I do not exaggerate when I say it brought tears to my eye when I thought of how much time he had saved me and my silly little pitchfork. These may not be the most exciting photos ever on this blog, but in all seriousness, even thinking about these piles brings more tears of joy and gratitude! Thank you so much Bill! And I’ll see you later today Liz at the boys’ soccer game!

This pile is compost from this last year, turned vigorously by Bill, inspected equally vigorously by Riley and MayMay.

The is the cheesecake shot of MayMay my more composted compost, soil worth its weight in gold and ready for me to put on the gardens now and next spring. Be still my heart!

First the children move out, and then when they return to visit, they bring their own kitchen equipment, because the stuff I bought at tag sales in 1902 is not good enough for them.

Thus it was that Ben returned home to cook us dinner about a week ago, bringing his own well sharpened Wusthof knife and some remarks about the dismal state of my foley food mill, the very mill that had pureed a thousand cups of applesauce for him when he was a small child.

About my knives, there were no cutting remarks, though my knives deserve these kinds of comment. My knives are so dull that people have been known to come to meals at my house with their own knife sharpeners. I kid you not. Back in the day, my father in law would bring his own wet stone to Thanksgiving dinner at our house.

No, in the instance of my dull knives, Ben was decidedly mute. He just whipped out his fancy new knife and set to work chopping an onion for his soupe du jour.

What can I say? Ben has decided to cook his way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, from volume one, page one to volume two, page five hundred fifty five. As a consequence, we are the lucky recipients of things like warm brioche and soupe catalan aux poivrons.

It’s a rough gig, but someone has to eat all this great food.

As I watched Ben speedily dice his onion, I got a dangerous glimmer in my eye. I wanted my own Wusthof. As we went through the brutal experience of taste testing that night’s Potage aux Champignons, I thought how nice it would be to have a sharp knife like Ben’s. I mentioned my hankering. Everyone determinedly changed the topic of conversation, “How about those Red Sox?”

Like a headstrong mare, (perhaps this should read AS a headstrong mare), I could not be turned from my course. Within a day or so, I had gotten a knife JUST LIKE BEN’S.

Day one and I tried to avoid Jim’s eye as I set to work furiously chopping JUST LIKE BEN. I seemed to be doing so well. Things were flying beneath the blade of this knife. I was so impressed with myself. Day two, after a slight nick while cavorting with a bushel of apples, I decided it was best to only use the knife when someone else was home. For several days, these supervised chopping sessions went swimmingly. But like all good horror stories, eventually the suspense was broken with a moment of drama.

You see there is a good reason that my knives are dull. When it comes to knives, I am NOT JUST LIKE BEN. I am NOT talented with knives. Jim knows it. I know it. Ben knows it. We all know it. Everyone was just waiting for me to get real about the insanity of me having a sharp knife.

It happened this weekend. I was chopping seaweed. There was a crowd in the kitchen. I was, no doubt, talking a mile a minute. And oops, there went the top of my thumb!

Enough said about that! As always, I was very grateful for Emergency Care and so was everyone else in the room. I was also so happy to gift Ben IMMEDIATELY with an early birthday present, one slightly worn Wusthof with history.

Lesson learned. Keeping up with Ben is no different than keeping up with the Jones.

And on that note, I think I will go and cut some bread for lunch It’s nice to put in five minutes of aerobic activity to get a slice of bread. When you can cut something fast you don’t burn nearly as many calories. Why, I think l will cut myself two slices of bread. It’s hard work sawing bread with a butter knife.

And Ben, in the future, you’ll need to bring one of your two Wusthofs when you cook here. That is, unless the aerobic activity of sawing onions for several hours appeals to you the way it appeals to me.

Late Saturday afternoon, it felt like we were going to have a frost that night. The air had that cold, bright, still feeling that I associate with a frost. I decided to cover the Red Shiso in season extender cloth, a material that usually keeps the Shiso protected from very mild frosts. Nothing much can protect it from a serious frost.

After supper, when I went to check Weather.com on the internet for its hour to hour temperature prediction, a night time low of 40 degrees at zip code 03770 was indicated, with colder temperatures predicted for Sunday night. Gosh, how official the computer screen looked with all its charts and graphics. At 1 am it would be 41 degrees but feel like 40 degrees with a dew point of 40, humidity 96%, and a wind of 1 mph coming from the NNW. Lulled into LaLa land by this barrage of information misinformation, I turned my Shiso alarm bells off and slept like a baby.

I try to harvest the Red Shiso as late into the fall as possible to give it maximum sunshine. I have a zillion theories about why our Shiso sometimes dries a deep maroon and sometimes dries a paler maroon. My theories about color variations include ideas about different seed lots, too much rain, too little heat, basically as many theories as a farmer can spin. One thing that appears to be really and truly true, regardless of other factors, is that the more sunshine the Red Shiso gets, the deeper the maroon color. This means I try to leave the Shiso growing well into these gorgeous clear days of fall sunshine.

I also try not to flirt too outrageously with frost danger, because Red Shiso is very frost sensitive. Like tomato or squash foliage, Red Shiso foliage is very tender and almost melts in a mild frost. Last Saturday night was the first night I could almost smell a frost. I knew my nights of Red Shiso Russian roulette had begun.

But still, I went to bed, thinking I had things covered, literally and figuratively. Weather.com had said it was so.

Sunday morning, my first inner alarm bell rang when I noticed that there was a frozen puddle of water on the back deck. As I stepped onto the deck to examine the frozen puddle, I noticed the air was extremely still, almost hushed, another bad sign. Then I noticed swaths of frozen grass swooping down through the gardens. Next, I noticed the roof of the screened porch out in the hayfield was covered in frost. By this time, I was sprinting towards the Red Shiso. Weather.com to the contrary, this had not been a 40 degree night.

Mercifully, the Angels and Elementals protected the crop. Frozen grass encircled the Red Shiso. Much of the season extender cloth had blown off the Red Shiso. The little bit of cloth that was in place was crackling with ice. Yet, most of the Red Shiso was covered in heavy dew, not frost. As I inspected the Shiso more closely, I saw that the occasional Shiso leaf was frosted, but almost all of the crop was fine. Thank God and all God’s helpers! This is the one crop I must have each year to keep going. Its the main ingredient in our stabilzer and a vital part of every bottle of our Flower Essences. I don’t even let myself imagine what it would be like to lose a whole year’s crop. It was challenging enough when two of the crops dried with very few maroon leaves and the majority of the crop too pale for use.

As I literally wept with relief, I thanked my Angelic and Elemental partners who protected the crop. Then I held a pow wow with them to see if I should start harvesting the crop. The consensus from my upstairs partners was that I should start to cut and hang the Red Shiso as soon as the sun had dried the heavy dew.

As I waited for the sun to dry the Shiso, I sat out in the sunshine reading Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter. Set in Mexico during the late 1800’s, the story begins with a charming little girl, Teresita, discovering her gifts as a healer when she is trained by a yaqui shaman named Huila. This is a woefully simplistic description of a beautiful, complex, enchanting epic written in an amazing kind of layered prose.

What I was thinking as I sat waiting for the Red Shiso to dry was that this book was one of the only books I have read in which someone teaches another person how to talk with plants or even mentions that it is possible to talk with plants. Huila’s work with Teresita begins as a very matter of fact process laced with humor. Huila notes that it is important to be able to talk with plants so that if you are traveling and someone gets the runs, you can talk with the plants you don’t know and have them tell you which one will help with this “flood of caca”. Her dramatic description gets Teresita laughing, but also gets her engaged in paying attention to what plants say.

When do any of us realize that we don’t process the world like other people? I am still learning that most people think my ideas about reality are… well… caca. Talking with plants may be nonsense to some, yet for me, it has been one of the loveliest and most solid things in my life. Gardens have always been filled with beloved friends. Yet so has everywhere else. There are always forgotten hedgerows, waste grounds, sandlots, or cracks in the pavement where a plant friend has sprung to life.

I am never without company. I see old friends everywhere, on every walk I take. I can stop to visit with these plant friends or not, but always there is the moment of recognition and delight in meeting again. This time of year on my lunchtime walk with the dogs, I greet a clump of Pearly Everlasting then note a cluster of Silver rod before admiring to a tumble of Asters. Always there is the exchange of gladness as we meet and greet.

Such companions!

Right now, my favorite walk ends in a downhill whoosh through a meadow covered in exuberant Goldenrods. As I move through their celebration it is probably as close as I will get to crowd surfing in a mosh pit, but it works for me.

Wherever I go, I remember what was growing there. I forget so much, but somehow I always remember where plant friends live. This has come in so handy when making Flower Essences. And if I am traveling, as Huila tells Teresita, I talk to every new plant I meet, certain that each one is a new friend and excited that perhaps this new friend will want to become a gift bearing Flower Essence.

Huila explains to Teresita that we can talk to plants or rocks or mountains and they will talk back. As a child, it never occurred to me that you couldn’t talk to a plant. And what a blessing that no one ever interfered with my life with plants by saying to me, “Now of course we mustn’t speak to plants.”

By mid morning, the Red Shiso was dry enough to be cut and hung. I got my clippers, asked the Red Shiso where it wanted me to start cutting and then set to work. It was peaceful. The Red Shiso looked lovely and dark as I threw bundle after bundle on sheets on the ground. Every so often I would haul a laden sheet to the Red Shiso building and tie bundles to the rafters. I knew that if I thought about how much there was to cut, I would feel overwhelmed, so I just kept cutting and hanging. Jim came and worked with me for a couple of hours. That was a great help.

As it began to get dark, we had cut and hung almost two thirds of the crop. I paused to ask the Angels and Elementals if they wanted me to keep going. I remembered the year when a heavy frost was coming and the Angels and Elementals had said that I needed to get the whole crop in. I had cut bundles into the dark, filling sheet after sheet with cut Red Shiso. In the cold starry night, I dragged the filled sheets into the Red Shiso building. It was a long night!

The good news last evening was that the Angels and Elementals said I had cut enough for the day. Jim and I covered the remaining Red Shiso with double layers of season extender cloth. At midnight, we turned a sprinkler on the Shiso and let it run until dawn. We thought the water coming out of the well at 50 degrees would bring a little bit of warmth to the Red Shiso. The Angels and Elementals were calm that this would be enough protection. They said the uncut Red Shiso was safe.

A fog blew in after midnight. Early this morning, when I saw this fog out my window, I knew there had been no frost.

Weather.com had predicted frost. The Angels and Elementals had said no frost. There was no frost.

Hmmmmm.

As a modern day Huila might say, “You can talk to everything, but don’t look for answers from the wrong things. Sometimes the nose on your face or the plants at your feet are going to know the weather forecast a lot better than some data served up in a box.”