Figs can break your heart

[lolaraincoat]

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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Comments

[elphaba-of-oz.livejournal.com]

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.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

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.

[elphaba-of-oz.livejournal.com]

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.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

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.