It’s always a good time to appreciate plant world magic. It’s a reason to be cheerful or grateful that is always there, always happening. We just don’t always notice.
A couple of magical little things at work in my garden right now: Calendula pictured above, still blooming beautifully (at least until a hard frost!)
white sage in afternoon sun
White sage – not a native of this area. And in danger. But this lovely plant pictured above grew in a pot for me this year from seed. White sage is the plant people buy to smudge a new apartment. As a traditional energetic cleanser it’s been over-harvested. I’m grateful it chose to grow in my garden!
leeks, dirt still in the roots, from the vegetable garden
Leeks. We don’t think about mid November as a time for harvest but my carrots, leeks, and swiss chard are still going strong. Not interested in tempting the fates, I harvested them today. Pictured above.
Swiss chard, a spring green, loves the fall, too. Yum.
Green spirits to feed, protect, and nourish us- still afoot in the garden. At least for now. And when the snow fairies arrive to bring the fallow season, some lovelies will sleep until spring – even more magic.
Oregano, still tender and green after a summer haircut, winters over beautifully to emerge again in the spring…
Here in the Northeast winters usually feel endless to me. This year I started early. The Cape is a little warmer owing to being on the seashore, and I have some early start herbs I’m putting in. WOOOO!
Cape cod soil is pretty much what you’d expect … sand and clay. And lots of it. So we trucked in some planting soil and started clearing away vines and debris in a sunny spot to the west of the house.
It doesn’t look like much right now but it will be full of flowering herbs this summer! And we’ve found a local fence company to put in a garden fence for us – it’ll have to be dug into the ground to protect my precious gardens from rabbits and woodchucks. Two stories come to mind whenever I think about rabbits and woodchucks decimating my garden: Peter Rabbit and Caddyshack. You wouldn’t expect those two to go together, would you??
early herbs include chamomile, echinacea angustifolia, comfrey
And importantly, our friends the garlic shoots have made an appearance:
garlic emerging from a bed of leaves
Is this garlic shoot seriously not the most adorable thing you’ve ever seen?
chard and onions starting to grow in a seed starter mat.
Finally, the onions and kale I started early are coming along. I added a few leek seeds in later, to the right, and I’m waiting for those to germinate. Later this month it’ll be lettuce, broccoli and cauliflower.
I am dreaming of spring flowers and greens, and beach walks. Soon!
A friend from our local farming non-profit, Farming Falmouth, turned me onto this application. It’s called SeedTime – it’s an app for planning gardens. He wanted me to evaluate it for the non-profit with an eye toward using it to plan gardens around town and … I bought it for myself. Some people can’t resist buying clothes, jewelry, and watches. This is the third online program and second piece of software I’ve purchased to play in my yard with. I know plenty of tech-savvy nature lovers, but gardeners? Not sure. Feel free to set me straight, but I think I’m pretty weird.
Anyway, the screenshot above is a pic of my developing and definitely NOT finished backyard plan. I’m grouping things that grow happily together and then matching that according to what gets planted during a given week. So, for instance, this picture above shows what’s growing in April. Later on, there will be other crops added and the crops and arrangement will change.
garlic growing in last year’s garden – scrapes are the curling pointed stalks you see here and they are delicious!
I managed to jam some garlic in before it got too cold – but I forgot to add it to my plan, so I’ll rework it to include the garlic, my rhubarb plant, and some herbs I put in the day we arrived. (Yes, I’m that attached to my plants.)
The planting – onions, early start indoors – starts in a couple of weeks!  Wow! Last year I direct-seeded onions and wound up with teeny-tiny little ones. I guess now I know why! They weren’t in for long enough! 
I have always ignored the days to maturity on my seed packets for three reasons. 1- I’m lazy (or too busy drinking wine while I plan the garden). 2- I am not growing for profit so I don’t *need* to know how long till maturity. I can just, you know, plant them and see what happens… and 3 – I’m not disciplined or organized enough to plan my calendar around my planting activities. I know my limits and the truth is I like to play in the dirt. I made mud cakes when I was a kid, too.
But seedtime makes it both effortless and fun to just plant things when you’re supposed to, and to actually *know* when to harvest them — It’s on a color-coded calendar! No more staring at the aerial parts and wondering if my roots are ready. It’s an epiphany.
Honestly, in all of my years working in the software industry I have appreciated A LOT about the cool things we built, but this takes the cake. And no, those guys have no idea I am writing about them in this blog. 
glorious, beautiful radishes just after harvesting garden last year.
I wish they included annual herbs (herbs that won’t grow happily in the northeast) in their crops schedule. I’ll suggest it! 
Sometimes we have to share. When you plan to share, that’s okay. It’s a little tougher to handle sharing when you aren’t expecting to, though. For instance, when I buy an ice cream cone I’m not thinking I’ll have to share it. It’s pretty great to have a whole ice cream cone all for yourself, it’s less great if you have to share it. The same thing is true for some garden goodies. I know the birds will share my raspberries. I expect it so I let the raspberries get a little bushier in order to have enough for the humans and the birds.
A different case is cabbage. One year I planted cabbage (my first and only attempt to date), which grew into beautiful gorgeous light green cabbage heads. When I picked them and cut into them they had already been claimed by some sort of cabbage worm. Such a drag, I was so excited to harvest my very own cabbage and NOT excited to share.
cabbage that the worms got to before I did
Writing about it reminds me of a lady I know that planted a beautiful set of raised beds in her backyard one year. She had 6 tall beds and many beautiful ornamental gardens all around her home. They were so impressive and beautifully tended that she opened them for a garden tour one year. On the night before the tour a family of groundhogs found her vegetable garden and absolutely razed every single plant in her boxes down to their nubbins. Completely down to the dirt.
When we garden tourists arrived to her home the next day we were all confused – why did she have all of those empty boxes in her backyard? Oh, well, we said. The rest of the gardens were glorious! …
Well, yeah. Groundhogs like tomatoes, too, it turns out.
I am not sure whether we have groundhogs here… I’ll find out this year I’m sure. In the meantime, though, I’ll be planning my tomato patch with basil to repel flies and hornworms. Rosemary with carrots and green beans to repel root flies and bean beetles, and thyme near my peppers to repel spider mites and white flies… in years past I’ve put some herbs into the vegetable garden but mostly I had an herb garden near the kitchen and veggies out back on a bigger site. I’m changing that now. The kitchen garden will have herbs, flowers and vegetables mixed in together. 
yellow pear tomatoes, green beans and peppers from the garden
Tomatoes with basil and marigolds, broccoli with beets and chamomile, radishes with spinach, lettuce, calendula, and beans, cauliflower with garlic, onions and chives … I’m getting hungry just thinking about it!
A good-sized pile of weeds for this early in the year and the hoe that helped dig them out.
I don’t know anyone that likes weeding. It’s back-breaking, necessary work. Sure, there’s some satisfaction in a weed-free garden bed but it’s short-lived. The weeds are back almost immediately, it seems.
So today was weed the garden beds day. I didn’t get them all weeded – I only managed to weed two of them. It was overcast, which is good weeding weather, and it had to be done.
And it’s fine. Pulling weeds from around the lettuce and knowing I’d be eating it in a salad later created a sense of calm and purpose. I took a break around noon, cut enough lettuce to fill a big colander, pulled a couple of radish, and came in to enjoy a nourishing lunch. It’s the most basic luxury to have to pay attention to when it rains (or doesn’t) and to know that aside from the nutrients in the soil there’s just water and sunshine in your food. And no plastic waste.
young swiss chard and pepper plants in the near bed, cutting lettuce behind it, beets and asparagus in the rear.
Back to weeding… I always joke with my husband that grass only grows where I don’t want it to. It never seems happy to grow on the designated lawn area, it much prefers my garden and our driveway.
Other “weeds” – verbena, squash, and tomato that self seeded, were spared. It’s tough to pull plants I’ve actually bought/planted just because they are growing in an inopportune spot. I dug out some verbena and put them in a spot near the kitchen window where I can watch the monarch butterflies visit their vivid purple flowers this summer. And the squash and tomatoes… I have a suspicion the squash is actually pumpkins. Last year they took over the garden because I felt bad pulling them out. In the end they crowded out the butternut squash, which I won’t let happen twice.
wildflowers in the west field
And then there are the pretty weeds, like the wildflowers that grow in our fields. These pretty daisy-like flowers pictured above, buttercups, purple, red, and blue flowers… we mow around them.
I’ll leave you with a photo of our cat, who really enjoys watching all of the activity at the birdhouse you can see pictured. It is nestled in a giant beast of a climbing hydrangea that has taken over one wall of our garage and is adjacent to a raspberry patch that is trying to take over the west field. Smudge (the cat) may be aware that there is a nest with baby birds … and the constant coming and going is the parents feeding their little ones. Or maybe not.
I’ve always regarded Halloween as the last harvest, and the time to welcome visiting ancestors who journey back to check in for the night. Some years I set extra spaces at the table and set out some old photos. This year was nice for me, because usually I have to delay my Samhain supper and/or ritual work for after the trick-or-treaters have come and gone but since Covid made putting a bowl of candy with lights and decorations the expected norm here in suburbia this year, I was off the hook! I put out my bowl, lit up my little witch, and was free to observe my holiday.
pumpkins for halloween decor
Along with my traditional Halloween activities, this year we had a pile of pumpkins and squash, radish, final peppers and tomatoes to collect.
We had so many pumpkins volunteer this year – so many colors and designs on them – that I have spent the past couple of days cutting, peeling and cooking to make mash for cookies, breads, and pies. It turns out that if you throw your pumpkins and squash seeds in your compost you don’t need to plant them in a garden bed – they pop up all over the place. The difficulty was choosing which plants to keep since we weren’t sure what kind of squash each plant was – so we selected for the location they chose to grow in and got a mix.
volunteer pumpkins and squash piling upa lot of pumpkin mash!
This might seem like a lot of work but I have a recipe for bourbon pumpkin pie that I kept firmly in mind as I peeled. And since the seeds are the most nutrient-rich part of the pumpkin…
drying pumpkin seeds to roast later
… we are drying them to roast later. I found that a bread board was a good way to dry them since they stick to paper towels, parchment, even plastic.
There may have been a small amount of halloween candy consumed to keep my strength up as part of this exercise. 🙂
We’ve made a few big pots of squash soup, which is a favorite around here, and some of what’s still waiting to be cooked is headed for the root cellar.
In all we’ve had a good harvest for the little plot of earth we grew vegetables in this year and I’m ready to eat squash and pie. Maybe I’ll add a little bourbon to keep warm!
Backyard Botanics 