November tomatoes, and a garden update

A month ago, just before the frost hit, I went and picked all the green tomatoes on my sungold plants and brought them inside. This is the first year that my little potted tomatoes produced enough fruit that there was any left at the end of the season, so this is the first time I've tried ripening green tomatoes indoors, and it seems like some kind of impossible magic trick. The skin is a little tougher than vine-ripened tomatoes, and they aren't quite as flavorful, but still--ripe, local tomatoes in Duluth in November.

Back in late September, I planted two pots of dill and basil seeds to see if I could grow them indoors through the winter. I probably should have started them a touch earlier, and I should be giving them some supplemental light now (they're just indoors in a south-facing window), but I am happy to report that they have sprouted and are growing. The dill is actually doing surprisingly well. The basil is a bit slower. I'll try to rig up some light for them (or pray for more sunlight; it's been overcast for the better part of the past month). My parsley and rosemary from last summer are still chugging along, and my parsley from two summers ago (2008) actually looks better than my parsley from this past summer.

This is how my actual outdoor garden looks now:
Or at least that's what it looked like before the wind kicked up again and ruffled the edges. The geometry of it in this photo makes me think it's some Andy Goldsworthy installation. What it actually is is flattened moving boxes put down to blot out the turf grass, a little bit of topsoil (and by "a little bit" I mean 560 pounds, but that's spread over about 450 square feet), and then 11 garbage bags full of leaves on top of that (with thanks to freecyclers and coworkers for the leaves; I have no big deciduous trees in the yard yet). In the spring hopefully the grass will be dead and the leaves and cardboard should be rotted enough that I can dig through without tilling. I dislike machines and would like to get by without rototilling if Ican.

I'd post a picture of what my compost bin looks like now, but it's just a pile of lumber with a few pieces nailed together. I'm going to try to finish it up this week or the next so that I can stop throwing perfectly good garbage in the landfill. Once I can start composting, I should be able to cut my garbage pick-up back to every other week.

Save Spirit Mountain (again)

Oh look, everyone hates me. (Click on "comments.") La la, that's okay, because I hate everyone, too.

I'm not going to bother to respond over there, since I really don't need to waste my energy on internet squabbling. When I e-mailed the City Council I was aware that my message could be forwarded to local media, but I was not anticipating it being posted on the newspaper's gossip blog, and I resent being thrown to the wolves like that. Besides, I think they've all already made up their mind that I am an evil liberal hellbent on destroying the American way of life (and proud of it!) so it's not like anything I could say would change their minds about me or the proposed Alpine Coaster at Spirit Mountain.

But I will say this: This is how habitat destruction happens. It's not all big land grabs, it's not selling Gooseberry Falls and building Mall of America #2 in its place, it is an incremental series of losses. It is a vacant corner paved over for a parking lot, it is scrub and weeds razed for condos, it is a few trees cut down and the noise, pollution and disruptive human activity of a roller coaster in the forest.

I never claimed that there were any rare birds nesting near the area proposed for the Alpine Coaster, but I can guarantee that there are some birds nesting there, and many more who depend on the area as a food source, and there will be a lot fewer if the Alpine Coaster is built. Other wildlife like squirrels or voles or shrews or porcupines will be displaced. Trees will be cut down, wildflowers and ferns will be trampled, insect and microorganism life will be disrupted. And, yes, I am enough of a bleeding heart liberal animal rights wacko that I believe that thousands of creatures' right to existence trumps a few human beings' desire to be entertained for 30 seconds. If they were cutting down some trees to build, say, low income housing, or a women's shelter, or a corner grocery store, or a solar panel manufacturing plant, I don't think I would complain as much.

The environmental impact of the stupid Alpine Coaster monstrosity is probably fairly small, in the grand scheme of things, but these losses add up. Wildlife habitat and quiet places are a very, very finite resource, and I don't think they should be wasted on something this inane.

ETA, 10-14-09: Related links, some more background (and a rant) on the Alpine Coaster, and a semi-related discussion on PDD about whether or not Duluth is anti-growth.

So, house.

It's a house. It's got an ancient furnace in the basement, and two (out of three) radiators upstairs don't work. The electrical is ancient enough that when I had extra outlets put in (because there were exactly zero outlets in the dining room or in the room I was going to use as an office) it ended up costing three times what I thought because the electrician couldn't connect the wires to my fusebox and had to put a subpanel in. It's been windy, and it feels like the windows are more for show than for actually keeping the cold air out. There is not a lick of insulation in the attic (unless you count an empty bee's nest, which I guess would provide some insulation). Nearly half the rooms in the house are painted pink, and the carpetting in the living room is among the ugliest I have ever seen.

However, there appears to be beautiful, finished hard wood underneath the carpet, and underneath the linoleum in the dining room, too. There's carved wood molding around almost all the doors, and most of the doors have antique engraved (!) hinges. The clawfoot bathtub is deep enough that I can float in it, and my hotwater heater is butch enough to fill it up with hot water. I have a view of Lake Superior from my kitchen and bedroom, and the other side of the house faces some woods and a creek. The yard is big and sunny, a little barren looking right now, but I can think of it like a blank canvas, then.

I started prep for my vegetable garden this week. I don't have a rototiller or a strong enough back to till it all by hand, and tilling disturbs the soil too much anyway, so I'm doing a kind of lasagna gardening thing with old moving boxes. Right now they're jut weighted down with leftover potting soil, but the plan is to cover them with topsoil, compost and mulch, and then plant directly into that in the spring, digging through the cardboard (which should be mostly rotted by then) if necessary.

I moved in the first week of September, and would have had plenty of time to plant trees and things, but I was too busy with packing/closing/moving/unpacking to arrange that, but now I have all winter to decide what varieties of apple or pear or plum I want to grow. I can fit a few fruit trees along the south/west side of the house, maybe something else in the front after I tear up the (uneccessary) driveway, and bushy or brambly things everywhere else. My mom got me some peonies, and I planted them along the south side of the house, underneath the kitchen window.

And now that I have posted something, maybe I can get back in the habit of posting regularly.

pesto recipe

The last of the basil
A few sprigs rosemary
A couple garlic cloves
Small handful raw pumpkin seeds
A few shavings of parmesan
Enough olive oil
Salt & pepper

Combine until pesto. Serve with cooked fusilli and pattypan squash sliced thin and fried until just crispy.

harvest

Personally I was happy with the cooler than average summer we were having for most of June and July, but my tomatoes have really appreciated the heat and humidity of the past week. I've been able to harvest a couple handfuls of Sun Gold cherry tomatoes so far, and my so-called Early Girls are starting to show some color now, too. My cucumber isn't doing to well; most of the fruit rotted on the vine, and the one that got to harvestable size was dry, dense and mealy. Cayennes are coming along beautifully, however, and I have a dozen or more fruits on my one little plant, although they're all still green. Made a batch of pesto with the basil, and the plants are coming back now so that I'll be able to make another batch in a few weeks; parsley and rosemary are thriving and have been harvested in handfuls here and there as needed. I'm going to start fresh pots of basil, dill and chives soon (although maybe not until after I move--first week of September, eek) to try to carry them through the winter. Dahlias, callas, snapdragons, zinnias, fuchsia, bee balm, bergamot, black-eyed susans, evening primrose and anise hyssop are all blooming now, much to the delight of local bees and hummingbirds.

15 minutes from door to bus stop

The lupine I planted two years ago from wild-gathered seed finally bloomed this year, all shades of blue and purple. The flowers are fading now, and some volunteer Evening Primrose is coming up, getting ready to bloom. I hope my landlord will continue to not mow this little patch of the yard even after I'm gone; the lupine, at least, look enough like garden plants that it should count as a "flower bed." My monarda is getting ready to bloom, too, with buds forming and some of the leaves near the top of the plants getting red, like they're in training to be flowers.

In other people's yards the peonies are fading and flopping over and giving way to lilies. Roses are in all stages, some brown and crunchy, other in peak bloom, and others still in bud. There's a rental property I walk by where last year somebody had planted tomatoes and basil in a tiny scrap of land next to the sidewalk. Somebody must've sweettalked thier landlord into allowing some more pernament gardening, because this year there is a trellis with a little grape vine. Already there are about half a dozen clusters of grapes, still tiny, green and hard.

In the grass beyond the woods behind my apartment, there were three or four flicker fledglings picking around for bugs; around the corner in my neighbor's yard there were two or three more. (They all scattered when I came on the scene, thus the inexact count.) I've heard from other reports that there seem to be more flickers nesting in town this year, but I must not be in the right places at the right times, because these were my first flickers in a long while.

Going up the hill I found a thumbnail-sized irridescent purple-brown Junebug looking thing (not so skilled in beetle ID, sorry). I stopped to admire him, then saw that he was moving a bit slow; I didn't see any obvious injury, but he could have been stunned from pesticides or a car impact. He clasped onto my fingertip when I held it out, so I moved him into the grass so that he at least wouldn't get stepped on. While I was at the bus stop, a little white moth fluttered into the gutter and twitched around there for a while. This one did have an obvious impairment, a slightly deformed wing, although I couldn't tell if it was the result of injury or birth defect. I ushered her into my palm and moved her to the grass, too, where she could masquarade as a fallen peony petal. Between the beetle and the moth, there was a fat, bouncy monarch. He nectared very briefly at a hop clover in the boulevard, then lit off down the hill in search of sweeter lands.

summer

Been busy fishing for a house this summer, and finally caught one. I just got the inspection done, so I think I get to relax a little bit until I close on August 31, and then I get to panic about moving in and fixing stuff. But--house! And a big sunny 50x140 lot for a garden.

This year's container garden continues to chug along, although it needs some real fertilizer. (I needed more potting soil when I was planting stuff this spring, and could not easily carry the 30 pound bags of organic soil home on the bus and did not feel like mooching a ride, so instead I bought Miracle Gro soil, because it came in smaller bags. Stuff looked okay at first, but now some of the leaves are yellowing.) Still, tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers all have either baby fruit or flowers on them, my fuchsia is blooming and my dahlias are just starting to. Dill got a case of the aphids, but has somewhat recovered, and parsley, basil and rosemary are all doing well. No swallowtails on the parsley this year... I think the seeds took too long to germinate and the butterflies passed me over.

I'm itching to get in my house, and it seems like a month and a half is an incredibly long time to wait (but I wanted to give the little old lady who lives there now time to pack up the 60+ years of stuff she has packed in there). I'm not in any huge rush to see how much it's going to cost to replace the boiler and put in insulation, but I really, really want to start working in the yard and prepping it for next year's garden--blot out some of the turfgrass, plant some perrenials, make friends with the neighbors who have apple and plum trees planted in their yard. Taking possession in September will still give me time to do all that before winter, but I want to do it now.