lolaraincoat | Figs can break your heart

There's still quite a lot of life in the garden this fall. This weekend I gathered up beets, onions, chard, herbs, tomatillos, strawberries, raspberries, and tomatoes. The tomatoes were mostly green but it seemed like time to bring them in to finish ripening. We'll get some more raspberries, squash and tomatillos before frost kills everything, some chiles, and maybe another eggplant. Oh, and the greens from the sweet potato vine, we need to eat those up too. There are figs on the fig tree but the frost will set in before they ripen, same as last year, and they won't ripen if I pick them green. Figs are fussy.

And there's still plenty of flowers: nastursium, mums, marigolds, morning glories, black-eyed Susans, thyme, a few stray roses still hanging on.

Last winter, and this summer too, were colder and a lot wetter than we usually get around here. That meant the grapes and apricots were unusually plentiful but not strongly flavored, unfortunately. And the peppers and tomatoes just hated it - they suffered from the lack of sunlight, and also from the slugs and snails we got in such abundance. (Are those kind of snails edible? Because if so, if they come back next summer I'm cooking them, purely in the spirit of revenge.) But this year's apples - not, alas, apples grown by us, but the local apples - are astonishing: big, crisp, sweet but not too sweet, intensely flavored. Apple trees love a hard winter, someone told me once, and it's true.

A raccoon, or something raccoonesque, has been knock over the garbage bin that the wet trash goes into, to get at the chicken bones (we think.) I am trying to regard this as a good thing: raccoons who are eating our garbage are too busy to be eating the zillion tulip bulbs I just planted. In other urban-farmer-lifestyle news, I've been in touch with these folks, who will come harvest your backyard fruit in my neighborhood if it all gets to be too much for you and donate the results to charity. So next year, if they decide to add grapes to their list, maybe we'll get some help with the horrible arbor that is totally the worst thing ever, I mean it.

Yesterday Fishwhistle cut the grass for what will likely be the last time this year. Tomorrow we'll put the backyard table and chairs in the garage, take down the air conditioners and put them in a closet, finish pulling up the tomato plants, clean out the wheelbarrow, pop some rosemary and parsley into a pot for a well-lit windowsill ... it's been a warm, sunny weekend, but it's time to get ready for winter now.

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A surfeit of grapes? I remember... to this very day... that one autumn my siblings somehow came home with some ridiculous amount of concord grapes, and tried to make grape jelly. Well... they didn't add enough pectin or forgot to add it at all, and the jelly didn't jell, so we wound up with some ridiculous number of jars of intense grape syrup. Can I just say... intense grape syrup on vanilla ice cream? I will say it. Intense grape syrup on vanilla ice cream. Again I say, intense grape syrup on vanilla ice cream.

Oh, yeah, we didn't even get as far as making jelly, because I loathe grape jelly. We made about twenty liters of grape juice, which was delicious but a hell of a lot of work, used some of the rest in making mixed-fruit jam, and ended up with maybe a third of them just going into the compost. Because we had enough grapes to fill six giant-size trash bags, you see.

Swear to god, someday I'll cut the fucking thing down and plant a great big apple tree instead. I like apples!

Mmmmmmm! Intense grape syrup on everything!

When I lived on a farm just north of Rome, the local people would come out with buckets after a big rain and pick up snails to eat. They'd keep them for a week or so in the bucket, feeding them raw cornmeal to clean their little gullets, before cooking. I have no idea what kind they were, though. Seemed like ordinary garden snails to me.

Huh. Interesting! Do you remember if they had striped shells? Our have striped shells.

I have no idea. I just remember the country people out there with rubber boots in the wet grass. I'm sure there are snail identification websites out there somewhere!

Oooh, at last a good reason to buy those shiny yellow rubber boots I've been coveting for years and years. And - d'oh! - of course, the internets! the internets will tell me what I need to know about snails!

"Goodbye, and keep cold...
Fear forty above more than forty below!"

from Lewis Untermeyer's parting benediction to his apple orchard, "Goodbye And Keep Cold".

Oh, that's wonderful. Thank you!

My dad used to put plastic on the fig tree he had at our house in Chappaqua to try to protect it from the frost. It was his folly. I don't know if he ever actually got any figs from it.

I thought figs were only hardy to zone 7. You're a brave and crazy woman, trying to grow a fig tree in that town in the great, frozen tundra you call home.

Oh my god no, I am neither brave nor crazy. The fig tree just ... appeared, last year, in between my poppies and my echinachea. It's a weed! But it's beautiful so I didn't pull it out.

Try the plastic. Just put a garbage bag over the tree at night when the temperature drops. Take it off in the morning so you don't cook the poor tree. It's worth a try.

Hmmm. Maybe. Seems like a lot of work, though. I mean, the tree is thriving - it's just that the half-dozen figs on it won't ripen before they're killed by frost.

Grape pie recipes keep popping up all over my internet this year. They sound bizarrely appealing to me. Though perhaps less so to you who does not like grape jelly.

Hmmm ... well, if you'd like about a hundred pounds of grapes to try out the recipes with, check back with us sometime in early September next year. But do the recipes all require seedless grapes? Because these grapes are quite seedy.

the recipes i've seen all call for concord grapes that you then seed. like this one: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Concord-Grape-Pie-I/Detail.aspx

i will so swing by toronto for an abundance of grapes next year!

Figs can break your heart

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