We pack in the projects this time of year: harvesting, planting bulbs, moving the greenhouse plants back into the greenhouse from their summer quarters outside and generally getting things ready for winter. We haven’t had a killing frost yet, but the weather forecast predicts we’ll get one tonight. It’s almost a full moon, and full moons almost always bring cold nights.

With frost danger so ever present, our main focus this past week has been to harvest our Red Shiso. It’s a really good crop this year with leaves a lovely deep maroon. This means our Red Shiso stabilizer should be nice and deep pink this coming year.

Here’s the last of the Red Shiso, covered last night with a generous amount of season extender cloth. Almost all the crop is already cut and hung in our Red Shiso building. This building got a face lift this summer when Jim, Will and Ben jacked up the building to redo the foundation, built a new set of steps into the building, and made repairs to keep the building watertight and animal proof. As Sophie, Lizzy and I hauled bundle after bundle down to the building, the joke was that someone is going to want to move into the Red Shiso palace, maybe soon. It looks beautiful!

In between Shiso harvesting, this weekend saw me beginning to prepare garden beds for planting fall bulbs. This involved moving a lot of compost to improve the soil before the bulbs get planted. Jim made me a great screen for compost sifting. Examining what’s left after I sift the compost has elevated this job to something rather fun.

As I shovel and sift I ponder long and hard about how on earth a bucketful of this:

gives me such beautiful soil but also so many strange lingering artifacts.

So many compelling questions like…
Have I really broken THAT many clay pots?
Do we really eat THAT many peaches?
Why do vegetable stickers never decompose?
And what is with the PINK MAGIC MARKER in the compost heap? Who composted that?

Ah yes…..Simple pleasures for simple people.

And given the number of compost nerds in my household, expecting us to properly sort and compost every last cupcake paper and dandelion root, its probably an excellent thing I am so easily entertained, because all this composting has left me with an awful lot of compost to sift and sort.

The Honeybees are also pleased by the fall Flowers.

It seems a shame to post anything after Ben’s Irish blog, but the seasons wait for no man and after a steamy summer, we have plunged into fall with its own particular beauty.

The sassy Rudbeckias match the season’s palette.

Late season spider webs decorate the Venus Garden.

In the kitchen, I am still trying to use 5600 cherry tomatoes a day.

The stiff winds of this weekend’s cold front blew over some Sunflowers, so I cut them up and filled the house with their sunshine.

Riley thought he was driving Emily back to college for her senior year yesterday. He would not budge from the driver’s seat. We all agreed that it was hard to be parted from our Emily.

In gardens that are looking crispy due to the drought, the life force tent still is wonderfully green from the inside looking up.

The outside of the life tent is pretty darn beautiful as well with its peak covered in brilliant Morning Glories.

I’m new to the gathering of flowers for Green Hope Farm essences, despite having lived in a home devoted to the task for 22 out of my 28 years. Thus I was nervous to perform properly for my Mother, Molly, when she sent me towards Ireland with a packet of blurry photos, flower names, and lots of stars and exclamation points around the words “Very Important.”

My trip to Ireland was based mainly on a mysterious prompting I saw in the ocean last summer, and even as I boarded the plane to fly to Dublin, I was unsure as to the purpose of my trip to the Emerald Isle. Upon arriving in my first destination, Ballybunion on the western coast south of the river Shannon, I had an inkling that I would enjoy this flower poaching business. I spent an hour searching the beaches, nestled between Ballybunion’s world famous golf course and the Atlantic, for Kidney Vetch, the first flower on my list. With my tee time quickly approaching and no sign of Kidney Vetch anywhere (***Kidney Vetch*** – VERY IMPORTANT!!!!) I paused to think about turning around and formalizing an excuse for returning to New Hampshire without one of Green Hope Farm’s must haves. It was at that moment that I looked to my feet and spotted a single blossom of what I was sure was Kidney Vetch, suggesting that it is not always the Green Hope Farm worker who finds the flower, but often the contrary. With that, I sensed a purpose for my Kerouac-esque journey.

Kidney Vetch

My trip in Ireland took me along the western and eventually northern coast of the island, through pockets of relatives in and near Clifden, into ancestral O’Toole territory on the ancient and tidal Omey Island, by (London)Derry and to the Giant’s Causeway near Portrush. I collected flowers along the way, including two from a town called Spiddal. While I wandered the rocky beach in Spiddal, I had an uneasy feeling, and was not sure any flowers I collected would offer beneficial vibrations. Upon returning to New Hampshire, I had a fitful night of weird dreams in which I was driving towards Spiddal, where I was to be burned at the stake for unclear reasons. These dreams clarified my uneasiness in Spiddal, and offered an explanation for the flowers that I had picked during my strange night in that little coastal town. Somehow I had tapped into a past life experience, and the flowers on that rocky beach understood how to navigate such a jarring and inexplicable sentiment.

Sea Holly on Omey

During my trip I felt a pervasive sense of depression across the land, highlighted by news reports of roadway deaths and economic gloom. Topics of conversation often included those already passed or those soon to, and for an upbeat American guy, the psychological climate was unsettling. Some called it “Famine Mentality,” and to this point, Ireland has lost millions of citizens in the last 150 years to death and emigration. Many of those who left were searching for a life with opportunities; opportunities that were unavailable in the Ireland of the 1870’s and 1910’s. A number of the flowers I brought back are helpful in protection against an overwhelming sense of sadness and loss. The island feels haunted by loss, both in the ether and on the sides of buildings: the Bogside murals below the Derry city walls depict victims of the Troubles for all to see.

Reward on a boondoggle

Near the Giant’s Causeway

Above all else, the Irish flowers I collected are about perseverance, whether dealing with loss, difficult connections to the past, or simply gray days with too much rain. The names are both mysterious (Bofin Unusual) and epic (Giant’s Causeway.) The places they represent run the gamut from cliff-side in North Ireland, to beach-side on Omey, to middle of nowhere gathered during one of my excursionary boondoggles, of which there were many. What has been so fascinating for me growing up around my Mother’s business is that often essences take on unexpected personalities because of customer reactions to them. I will look forward to learning about these essences through your collective eyes.

It’s looking like a real vineyard out there, but the head of the vineyard (someone we will call eldest son B) has told me that he is “not ready” to make vino this season.

I do not know what technical problem holds up his process. We all suspect he does not think our feet are clean enough. In any case, in the face of this delay, I wish I could give my shoulders a gallic shrug and say, “There will always be next year’s vintage.” but I have a serious case of garden guilt, and this precludes any sort of relaxed response to eldest son B’s laissez faire attitude about the grape harvest.

My garden guilt means I find it painful to waste anything the garden throws at us, except for maybe zucchinis. So yesterday, I looked at the rows and rows of ripening grapes, the product of many years of eldest son B’s pruning and many hours of Sophie, Emily and me on our hands and knees weeding the small vineyard for eldest son B….

and thoughts turned to grape cookery.

First it was necessary to wipe the last peach froth from our moustaches, because the last two weeks has seen us wallowing in peaches morning noon and night.

For days we waddled back and forth to the peach trees, wearing our peaches on our hips and lips, garden guilt driving us to new heights of peach creativity. It was Top Chef all over again as we had peaches in drinks, soups, salads, main courses, and dessert.

Besides the de rigueur bowls of peaches at every meal, there were peach crumble pies, peach custard pies, peach kuchens, peach smoothies, peaches and cream, peaches on pancakes, peach blinis and that was just the normal stuff. With this year’s bumper crop, we learned that peaches go with just about everything even tacos

Why, even the dogs were dining on peaches. While usually it was just peaches for their breakfast, one day I treated them to a big slice of leftover peach kuchen, because there was another hot peach pie waiting for the humans.

But last night, as the peach harvest began to slow, it was grape time and I had one of my Sisyphus like ideas to make a GRAPE PIE.

This was a deranged idea for many reasons. First, wine grapes are about the size of my red currant cherry tomatoes. Second they are 98% seeds. But this didn’t stop me. After all, I am now spending so much time collecting wee tomatoes in the garden, I figured how bad could it be to de-seed 6 cups of eldest son B’s grapes. The answer to this question. my friends, was, “Surprisingly bad.”

Perching myself in front of Man vs Wild’s Bear Grylls with various children rooting me on, I figured I would pass the time pleasantly while Bear fought crocodiles in Northern Australia. An hour later as Bear Grylls broke through a tangle mess of mangroves to civilization, my heroic efforts had garnered us a 1/2 cup of grape skins and arms covered in sticky grape juice.

We broke for dinner which at this point in the summer is gazpacho and more gazpacho because really, just how many red currant cherry tomatoes can one pop in one’s mouth- at some point they have to be blenderized just to simplify the eating process. Plus gazpacho is great for garden guilt as it’s a great way to use abundant cukes, garlic, and peppers (and real he man tomatoes if you have them).

Two hours hard labor after dinner and STILL the bowl only had about four cups of grape skins. It was time to just make the pie and have it be a slender but delicately undernourished thing ( the only thing around here that could claim this).

My first and only GRAPE PIE came out of the oven at ten and people were frankly too exhausted by the process of watching me de-seed grapes to even try her ’til this morning. Pie for breakfast has sort of gotten mundane around here, but this morning her loveliness drew people in.

Don’t be fooled by this close up, those grapes are smaller than they look- But who’s complaining? She was delicious, tasting a lot like ……….blueberry pie………which means I have now officially sworn off ever making a Grape Pie again.

Eldest son B is out of town this week. Sadly this means he may never ever taste Grape Pie unless he battles grapes seeds in his own four hour de-seeding marathon.

4 hour marathon prep for Grape Pie + 20 minute prep for Blueberry Pie= No second Grape Pie for eldest son B

Funny how I can manage a gallic shrug about that!