We had a frost last night. I went to bed to toss and turn and get up for seventy rechecks of weather.com’s hour to hour forecast for our zip code and at least twice as many pep talks from the Angels during which they said, patiently I might add, that the Red Shiso would be FINE.

They were right. The Red Shiso was fine. But there was crunchy white grass underneath the Red Shiso this morning and that is sort of a close call for a person with a vivid imagination. You can probably imagine it too, MY meltdown were the Red Shiso to melt down in a frost.

Sadly, the possibility of frost comes every night this time of year. The Angels have suggested that for tonight I run the sprinkler on the Red Shiso for an hour or so before covering it in the lightweight season extender cloth. Then they suggest I get up at 3 am to turn on the sprinkler to keep the crop wet through those early morning hours when it is the coldest and frost rolls through the farm, banging into gardens on its way downhill.

All these directions suggest an even closer call tonight.

I wonder when this life on the razor’s edge of frost will get to me and I will start the harvest, even if the Angels AND weather.com forecasts a stretch of balmy 50 degrees nights. These late season nights tend to be restless and not just for me. Jim doesn’t sleep much better than I do this time of year. The reason being? He doesn’t even have to imagine a Molly meltdown. He has seen one!

So why don’t I just go out there for everyone’s sake and chop, chop, chop? This is certainly the question I ask myself. But there is a good reason to lose sleep, visit weather.com more times than a budding meterologist, and keep the Angels on speaker phone.

Every extra day the Red Shiso gets of brilliant fall sunshine before it is harvested might make all the difference in terms of its color. Last year, I harvested the Red Shiso extremely early. I freaked in the face of frost warnings. It was August when I caved. We had a mild frost the night after I harvested the crop, probably the kind of frost I could have managed with the sprinkler and then, we did not have another frost until mid- October. It was unprecedented, to go this late without a frost. The August harvest proved to be too early for a really purple crop. Every day until the middle of October, I got to reflect on this, as I saw how much more time and sunshine the Red Shiso could have had to get more deeply pigmented.

Virtually the whole harvest dried with almost none of the purple leaves we use to make our tincture. The staff will attest to this. They will also offer sworn testimonials that it is absolutely NO FUN to pluck dried Shiso without the Red.

This week the staff will finish plucking the meager couple of purple leaves from bundle after bundle after bundle which has constituted the main activity associated with this past year’s harvest. I think they may break out the champagne to celebrate the last bundle’s composting. It’s been a long year without the thrill of brimming baskets of purple leaves.

I will be ready to celebrate too. Maybe out in the gardens with my sprinkler at 3 am. I will celebrate because even with this pale crop, we still managed to eek out our year’s Red Shiso tincture from what we had. And that was no small miracle. The amount of Red Shiso we have left before we will need to use this new crop is negligible, whereas sometimes we go well into the winter before using the new season’s leaves.

I have to smile. The Angels hold my learning curve with so much compassion AND foresight. After all, they had me plant enough to get sufficient tincture from a half baked crop!

THE NEXT MORNING
I stopped writing yesterday afternoon to haul out the season extender cloth and spread it on the Red Shiso.

I also went to Willy’s first soccer game. The sky was clear, the sun was bright, but the air was chilled. On the sidelines, folks were bundled in winter coats. The talk was about frost warnings. The local newspaper, affectionately known as the Valley Snooze, forecast 21 degrees for some places in our area. This caused quite a stir. 21 degrees is not a mild brush with frost. It’s a killing frost and no amount of season extender cloth is going to work in the face of that temperature. I tried to concentrate on the game at hand. Poorly, I might add.

Then I came home and let go. That seems to be the theme of my life right now. JUST LET GO. The Angels had said my preparations were enough. They knew what was to be better than the Valley Snooze. I had done all they had asked and needed to lay down my worries. No matter what happened, I needed to remember the Angels would have a plan. I needed to stop holding onto worry to bolster an illusionary sense of control. I needed to let it go.

I slept fine under a pile of blankets and so did Shiso. Despite the forecast of a deadly cold, fog rolled in after midnight and blanketed the Red Shiso and all the gardens in a lovely warm cover of fog.

The last few weeks, the Angels have asked me to drink a quart jar of water with Flow Free in it each day. What with kids going, fall coming, bees swarming, I have needed a lot of support to go with the flow. As I woke up this morning and saw with a rush of gratitude that in letting go, there had been other more capable hands picking up the burden of keeping the Red Shiso warm, I felt hopeful and at peace.

Somewhere down the road, maybe after quart six hundred and thirty seven of Flow Free water, I may actually get the hang of this letting go thing and in the meantime, I will be well hydrated!

Rumor has it that Emily may be home for supper today. At lunch time I went out to raid the vegetable garden for her favorite vegetable, potatoes. So far this season I have been digging up fingerling potatoes from down in the green tomato patch. The Angels have me plant the potatoes in a different place each year. However, much as I try, I never seem to find all the potatoes, so there are always some lingering ones to be harvested from the last location where they were grown.

Today, for the first time, I harvested potatoes from the official planting location this year, the brassica & potato spiral. With May May and Riley’s noses right in the thick of things,

I uncovered the hay from the first three inches of the potato spiral to find, in less than a minute, these enormous Caribe potatoes. Nine pounds of them. Hardly had to get my hands dirty. They were just under the hay mulch, bursting out of the soil, just waiting to be picked up. The one on the right with the funny attached knob is one potato, weighing two pounds. It’s going home to be dinner for Vicki, her husband Kevin, and the babe to be.

Let’s compare this to this ENTIRE week’s tomato harvest (Wildly optimistic hoarding has begun for a second batch of sauce).

Total weight of tomatoes harvested this week from 30 plus plants? Two pounds. You do the math. Not too much head scratching necessary to conclude yet again that those Angels sure know what they are talking about.

I knew my four children would move out one day. I just didn’t know it would feel like they all moved out on the SAME day. I had a fleeting sense of these impending departures during the summer, a passing thought that the dishes in the sink would be something me and the rhino would miss.

Now, it’s not only an empty sink here at Green Hope Farm, but an empty nest too.
I’ve mentioned Ben and Elizabeth’s departure to their own apartments. What I didn’t expect was that high school senior Emily also would completely vanish in front of my eyes. She has so many soccer practices, so many after school meetings, so much socializing to do. I think I saw her yesterday, but I am not sure. I may see her today, but I am not sure.

William and Jim are also busy. Last night, I was goofed up. I expected people, yes, a new sized group of people, but still some people, to come home eventually for dinner. It was so far after my idea of worry time when Jim and Will finally surfaced. And of course, my well crisped dinner was too much even though I tried to rein in my cooking volume.

After my meltdown, we tried to coordinate schedules for the week so I would be more prepared for my empty sink. Doesn’t look like even a low population dinner is in the offing soon.

So rhino and I are home alone thinking about how we can occupy ourselves.

We could dive into one of three four seven fourteen countless piles of paperwork. Sounds almost as much fun as a festive family dinner!

Nature truly abhors a vacuum. I kid you not. As I was writing this blog, the driver of a tractor trailer truck arrived at the door to say that he couldn’t make our hill with his load of glass bottles for us. He had to leave them at the bottom of the hill for me to bring up to the barn myself in our little truck.

Well, I am off to haul bottles.

And I have company. Rhino is willing to ride shotgun.

Green Tomato Mincemeat? Fried Green Tomatoes? Green Tomato Pickle? Green Tomato Marmalade?

I have every freezing, canning, and preserving cookbook I own out on my kitchen counters as I search for recipes for green tomatoes. Some little green pear tomatoes that were reluctant to turn yellow are pickling in a brine crock right now. I have all the ingredients on the butcher block to make green tomato mincemeat. Finding more green tomatoes for more heirloom recipes won’t be a problem. The only tomatoes in my garden are green tomatoes.

Apparently most other local gardeners have the same situation on their hands. The fellow gardeners I have bumped into lately all want to talk about this strange gardening season. Eventually, everyone gets around to their green tomatoes. This Saturday, someone at the Cornish Farmer’s Market had a box of about forty ripe tomatoes for sale. I was impressed and wondered what she had done differently than the rest of us. As I complimented her on having ripe tomatoes, she noted that the only reason she had that many was that she had eighty five tomato plants. She too had nothing but green tomatoes.

There is something going on with the tomatoes this year. They just aren’t ripening.

When I plan the gardens with the Angels each winter, the designs for the gardens are very precise. A geometric pattern is set by the Angels for each space. Then I receive guidance about what kind of vegetables to grow, specific varieties to use, and numbers of greenhouse grown seedlings to transplant into each garden.

This year, the main vegetable garden and the second big vegetable garden had no tomatoes as part of their design. Even though one is a sixty foot in diameter circle and the other a forty foot diameter, the Angels did not include tomatoes. I didn’t listen to the subtext here. I never really want to know what it means when the Angels say no melons, no eggplants, no tomatoes or any other heat loving vegetables this year. I don’t want to know in January that I will be using my down quilt all but about three days all summer as was the case this year.

So, I pretended the writing was not on the wall. I asked if I could put in a few tomatoes in a small garden area down by the raspberries that was open for planting. The Angels said fine, but to grow only a very few. It was sort of a “whatever” message that clearly indicated that it was a waste of time and garden space to grow tomatoes this year, but I didn’t want to listen. No heat? No sunshine? I all but blocked my ears and sang “I’m not listening”.

That first weekend in March, I started what I thought was a very small but colorful array of tomato varieties. My problem came when I went to plant these tomatoes and realized I had more than I thought. I hate composting a perfectly good little seedling, especially this year when it had been such courageous work for any seedling in there to survive a greenhouse season with virtually no sun. So I planted the thirty or forty plants.

And there they sit, a reminder to listen better. Yesterday after hoarding semi ripe tomatoes for a week, I had enough tomatoes for one very small batch of sauce. I was surprised the sauce was even red. I mostly used cream colored, yellow pear, purple cherokee, and orange tomatoes because they were the only ones ripe. And we are not talking dozens of tomatoes making up this sauce batch. We are talking the saddest little pile of woebegone tomatoes ever.

I mean, you know you have a problem when even the cherry tomato varieties stay green.

So the bigger picture here is how are we going to navigate climate change? It’s hard not to notice that we live in a different micro climate than a few years back. I recently read an article of dire predictions about world wide crop failures as the climate shifts globally. It occurred to me that beyond the obvious solution of planting a diversity of crops wherever you live, it will be vital to listen carefully to what the Angels suggest we grow, all of us, even folks outside this frame of reference.

It was a good learning experience for me to be so graphically reminded that the Angels really do know what they are talking about. They had me plant an enormous amount of potatoes this year. Probably four times what I have ever grown before. With all the rain and gray weather, potatoes have done fabulously. Irish summer= Irish crops= Good harvest.

Their choice of vegetables to grow this year was narrow, but it was spot on. My second big vegetable garden was just potatoes and brassicas. But everything they guided me to grow has flourished. The tomatoes, chosen on my watch, may not feed me, but they taught me a lot. I don’t have to fear climate changes so much as stay with my guidance.

Right now, I can still go out to my local coop and fill in the gaps of missing produce. But with fuel costs skyrocketing, I think it is not a Cassandra like suggestion to think that we will all be more and more dependent on locally grown foods in the years to come, that perhaps the gaps won’t be so easily filled by apples from Chile and eggplants from Israel. It may not be just a question of fuel costs. My friend from Chile tells me that they are experiencing 70 degree temperatures this winter with everything blooming way too early to set fruit. Who knows if there will always be great volume of produce to import from Chile or anywhere else?

Given the unpredictable nature of the climate changes, there really is no sensible alternative to listening to the intelligence in nature. We have to do this on a grass roots level, garden by garden, and not expect Del Monte to take care of us. By the time Del Monte realizes it has to switch gears about what to grow, we may be pretty hungry!

Working with the Angels and Elementals in a garden is not rocket science. The same kind of kinesiology I describe in the Guide works well for talking to the Angels and Elementals of the vegetable garden. They are happy to talk and they know what they are talking about. Over time, the communication gets easier and easier. My mistakes don’t reflect on them and their wisdom. It’s just me listening inattentively that clogs the works.

But no use crying over spilt milk. I am deeply grateful that the Angels and Elementals will be there come the Winter Solstice, ready to begin again to plan our 2007 gardens with me an even more attentive partner. And they will be there with you, if you want to work with them.

Let me know any way I can encourage any of you to join in this cooperative effort. I have green tomatoes because I didn’t listen and potatoes to feed an army because I did listen. And blessedly my partners, the very ones that would be your partners too, are so kind. They celebrate all my learning no matter how it happened. They’ll celebrate yours too!

It’s not just pears and plums ripening here at the farm. Vicki’s baby is due four weeks from today. I thought her mother Carole, who lives in Illinois, might like to see how her daughter is blossoming! Carole is coming when the baby is born, but maybe not before.

So here is your darling daughter! As you can see Carole, Vicki’s sense of humor remains intact! And we are all good to go, especially now that I have finished knitting the baby’s sweater.

See you soon!