The rain gauge runneth over

Rain: sweet, clean, thrumming saturation. I've lost track of inches, but we're well past five this last week.

'Kolibri' kohlrabi

While the tomatoes and eggplants seem small and hard, stubborn and scowling, others in the garden are positively glowing in this cold, wet weather. We direct-seeded kohlrabi in July, and they are now tennis-ball sized, crisp, sweet, turnipy and tender. Much improved over the earlier batch which was sown indoors and set out in the spring - those languished. Next year I plan to direct seed all the brassicas (cauliflower, cabbage, kohlrabi, broccoli) earlier (end of March), and then some of them again in July, so that they're never trying to size up in the hottest part of the summer.

Carrots, July-sown for fall harvest

It has been a beautiful rain - teeming at times, misting at others - always perfectly vertical. And in it, the carrots seem to be muscling each other about, shoulder-to-shoulder-to-shoulder. Do they make a popping sound as they plump... or is that them, squealing in expansion?

Arugula, white Russian kale, and bronze fennel for salad tonight

The cold frame beds are their own lush little arugula pastures. There is no green I like better, which is a good thing, because nothing else germinated quite so well. There will be chard, lettuce, upland cress, mustard and baby kale to cut eventually, but not in great bowl-topping mounds like the arugula.

Candy-Striped Leafhopper

This is Graphocephala coccinea, the candy-striped leafhopper, wearing its amazing technicolor dreamcoat (click to enlarge).

Matt found it in the mustard greens whilst cutting salad mix for dinner. When I pointed the camera at it, it stuck that orange spike out its back end and squirted fluid!!! This caused me to squeal with delight.

You can find a more informational report on this insect at Urban Wildlife Guide.

An Underwater Desert

My mother is a painter and a gardener, so it makes sense that her plantings have an artist's eye. I can't really do this year's doorway composition justice with my photos, but it is my favorite garden arrangement of the season, so I wanted to share it anyway.

Above, there is a wide, squat pot just southwest of center... It is stuffed with succulents my mom picked up in the spring. To me, they look like sea anemones that are cactuses. The mat underneath is golden moneywort (Lysimachia nummularia 'Aurea').

Below, the zinnias in the background are terracotta colored when they open, fading to sun-bleached sand when they are spent.

This astounding purple fellow has little cups that hold water.

Sometimes people ask if the saddle shoes were mine when I was small. They weren't. I was born to be woods-wild, so white would never do.

You can only see its leaves in the first picture, but this hot red hibiscus unfurls a flower or two each morning.

Tomatoes. Lots!

It's been a good year for tomatoes. Despite the dry, we had a hefty haul, and this is the first season in a few that we haven't had some sort of blight affliction.

That's a picture of our second big picking off the six plants in our city garden (mid-August). I processed those into sauce, using my mom's old Victorio strainer. And was it ever a tedious endeavor. Remind me to rein us in next year and stick to two beefsteak heirlooms, for rushed lunches.

Impatient goes hand in hand with stubborn, and I claim expertise in both. Here's a picture of me, the last time I used the Victorio.

It will be another 28 years before I'll think the Victorio is a good idea again, and by then, I'll have unloaded it at a garage sale. Or heaved it down a mine shaft, Scranton style.

Overreacting to the amount of work that little pile of tomatoes was, you say? Indeed. This isn't a food blog, after all. Those beefsteaks are mostly water, and after the wall-splattering event of churning them through that contraption, and the sticky floor, thrice mopped, you still have to cook them down into a disappointingly small pot of sauce. Such a little dribble! You could never survive the winter on it.

The first batch of tomatoes I "processed" was whole fruits thrown in freezer bags, skins and cores and dirty bits intact. The second batch was as detailed, above. The third batch was a giant five-dollar-farmers-market sack of Romas, roasted in a pan with garlic, then buzzed up with fistfuls of herbs and the immersion blender. For all you lazy homesteaders out there, I'll tell you: that's the way to go. If your significant other, who happens to be a former chef, scowls at the idea of skins-left-on, just tell him you have way more important things to do. Like drink wine on the back porch. Drink whiskey on the back porch. Draw pictures, dance dances, drink cider.

I refuse to undertake any task at all that requires more than three hours to complete, starting RIGHT NOW.

But it only takes ten minutes to pick clean the cherry and paste tomatoes in our country garden. Then I wash them, cut them in half, and spread them on a sheet pan to dry in the baker's big ovens, after a night's bake. They turn into rubies that are better than jewels, because you get to eat them. This is the kind of kitchen labor I can get behind.

For the Love of Toad

I really, really love toads. There has always been a toad, forever and ever, that lives in my mother's greenhouse. Some years the toad spent sunny afternoons in a little pillow of baby's breath on the gravel floor. Some winters she bedded in a potted plant... geranium, cyclamen, begonia - a soft rising and falling of the peat soil after watering. Always the same big toad, the size of a whole heaping handful? I don't suppose, but I don't know... But always a toad, on the sidewalk at the greenhouse door, catching bugs in the butter-melt of light at night.

Today there was a big toad in the garden I weeded. We both were sheltered under cosmos. The toad startled me in a clump of grass, half submerged in the black-pearled dirt that worms had roiled up. Later, I startled some skateboarders just off the school bus - me, short and blond and quietly rattling around inside sunflowers and polygonum. Hidden, like I like to be.

I would never have seen the toad if it were not for the warts on its back. They look like geodes.

I live in the city now. There are no toads in my garden, or snakes. I hate that. I've been waiting for one for six years, and I'm going to move to the country soon because, while they have not come, I still seem to be here.

But there is a toad who lives between two sidewalk blocks on Cherry Street. You have to go down the alley, then up, anytime after the streetlamp has switched on. Then, there's Toad! So you say "evening, Toad." And Toad says nothing at all.

Prospect Street Gardens

I visited the small farm of some friends a couple of weeks ago. Rena and Mark use organic/biodynamic techniques at Prospect Street Gardens, right on the edge of Montrose, PA. They sell produce Fridays at the town's farmers market. I took a few photos while I was there...

Panorama of the main gardens (click to enlarge)

I was really impressed with how tidy everything was. Who doesn't love clean fluffy weed-free beds, or for that matter, any job well done? The three beds in the lower left had recently been seeded to winter crops (greens and carrots, I think).

Mark plucking pesky borage volunteers out.

The hoophouse was overflowing with tomatoes, basil, peppers, ground cherries and marigolds.

Mark and Rena, having just staked
some heavily laden pepper plants.

Rena collecting tomatoes in her shirt.

See more pictures of the farm at their facebook page... Prospect Street Gardens.

Bathroom Toad

This is the little walnut-sized toad that lives in the corner of the lady's room at Gibbs Garden Center in LeRaysville, PA. He is short (under three quarters of an inch), so he can go in and out under the door as he pleases. He is my favorite thing that I found this week.

And this is the spider who lives in my orach seeds. He (she?) resembles toad, don't you think? (Click the picture to make it bigger.) This spider is my favorite thing that I found last week.