Wires get put back on poles. Branches do not. Trees lost are gone for good.

I drove off for Lowell General Hospital after the first 2 hours that the snow started to fall. It's usually an hour drive and I wanted to keep it to that. The wind started to come along with the pelting of heavy snow and I felt that if I left for the hospital, one day ahead, for my 24 hrs of call to follow, I would be better off. I was.
There is no point to dwell on all of this now. The damage has been done and like many communities who have experienced devastation, the only thing left to do is move on. Only along the way, and over time, does the story unfold...

We had 16 inches of heavy wet snow. It fell on autumn leaved trees and evergreens. It blanketed the garden which caused its abrupt end for harvesting. Somewhere under there are still parsnips, kale, parsley and carrots. I may still get to see them because much of the snow may melt off this week.
Winter usually means that the garden is "put to bed". It has a peaceful and quiet feel to it. All is well, comes to mind. Leaves are mulched on top of empty garden beds and old vines are pulled and composted among other tasks.

However, this storm ravaged our hillside much like the ice storm had in 2008. Mature trees fully leaved were snapped in two. Others lost branches or branches were so severely bent they were snapped. Shrubs, bushes and plants were weighted down bending or breaking, or so buried that their fate is still unknown.
When I heard through Kent's failing cell phone that we had lost two of our larger apple trees and one of the new ones that I had planted this spring, my heart just broke. Other apple trees had main branches snap. I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
 I fell silent from the news. Then, I felt my throat heat as it does before tears well up from that deep place where sadness roots itself. I couldn't see what happened. Kent was worried that his cell phone would soon run out of battery. He didn't want to take a picture. It didn't matter. Grieving is an emotion. I did not need my seeing of this destruction to understand. Did I need to see it? Silly, over trees, I was grieving! Not because they were  trees. I grieved because I had lost APPLE trees.

Apple trees, I have come to learn, are symbolic of the essence of bounty here on the hillside. They are truly the "fruits of the earth". They take time to mature before they will produce apples. So, there is patience involved.  They take on so much weather, infestation and other hardships that when the apples appear, they seem like red juicy miracles. Hmm. This sounds like there is neglect involved, too.  No, no, I do hope to continue to do a better job in the future with helping them out. They need so much. This will take time. So, despite everything that occurs in nature around them, they have survived. They blossom in the spring, set their fruits and grow.
Until yesterday.

That's what hurts so much. That, this one freakish October snow storm took down these tough-it-out New England raised apple trees in one blow. Only one thought remains. This wasn't a New England thing that happened. This storm set records. Jaffrey, New Hampshire, just north of us by about an hour, won the greatest amount of snow award with 30 inches reported. Never mind, the record rainfall for October alone which was almost double its usual average. We have been setting new records almost every other week. But, is this ok? Is this normal?

Time for moving on....It is 50F.  The sun is shining and I can hear water dripping off the roof. There's work to be done.  I plan to put on my boots and salvage the apples off the fallen trees. Clean the young tree. It's stump I'll leave for now. Older ones will have to lay where they are until we can break them down, first branch by branch, and then by chain saw for their trunks. Finally, we will stack what we can burn in our wood stove for the winter months ahead.

Before

after

Apples salvaged through the snow and fallen branches

Snow, ends the season of tender leaves and flowers

Snowing in October! Oh no wait! It's raining. No, again. It's both -ing.

Maybe that title doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense out there either. This is the 27th of October! It has been unseasonably warm most of the month and unseasonably wet but not unseasonably cold. Tonight it is predicted that our rain/snow mix will turn to all snow and drop below freezing. Ugghh.

I knew this was coming and that I would be "post-call" when I would have to face it. I came home this morning through a driving rain and with the need to replenish myself first before taking on what I needed to do.  I couldn't go straight out after I got home around 9:30am. I should have, though. The weather only got worse.

I always put on my knee high red rubber boots to go out, even in the middle of July: Shorts or jeans with rubber boots, coupled with a tank top and my broad-brimmed hat. I might bring a pair of garden gloves to put on but even if I put them on, they come right off only a few minutes after I get started. So, I don't usually put them on unless I know I'll be in poison ivey. There is something about touching the earth directly with my fingers that's very important. Not sure why. Wearing gloves is a disconnecting experience and here I am trying to connect. Maybe that's why.

 Today wasn't too different. Pulled my rubber boots over my jeans, had my thermal long sleev-er on, fleece jacket, rain shell, scarf, but no gloves. Our outdoor thermometer read 36F. Outside it was pelting snow mixed with rain. Our fields are so so wet from the previous rains that boots are essential now to get across the soaked ground to the garden gate.
I grabbed my hand clippers and a larger old plastic plant pot for a basket. "Here goes!", I thought. I felt like I could create a do-it-yourself garden reality show out of this. And, just so I could save our remaining peppers and eggplants? You betcha! I squashed out there, boots, hooded and gloveless into the snow and rain.

I lasted, ohhhh, 15 minutes. My hands were pink with cold and in pain. But, we had beautiful eggplants this year. They have beautiful purple flowers with yellow centers that seem to nod one way or another. Each flower peers up between a gorgeous broad purple tinged green leaf as if to say; "I'm still here". How could I resist from caring?

I grew these mildly sweet stir fry type peppers that are long and skinny. They turn red over time. These were prolific and there were many to get today, too. I only kept going long enough to fill my large plastic bucket then I had to quit because my hands got too cold.

Inside, I cleaned out the woodstove to start a fire to get the chill off.  32F now. There is one heartening observation that I can make. The earth is still warm enough to melt the snow after it has fallen. Perhaps, the peppers and eggplants that I may have missed will be just fine.

"It is time to keep a garden"

I have been here before. Not the "time to keep" part but the other part about "a garden". I have had a garden before or attempted to have a garden before. I would pour over the catalogues, buy boxes of seed, draw multiple squares for plots while enlarging the garden in my ever expanding vision of what a family garden should look like. It wouldn't be much later, say, May, one year when I developed a serious back injury from repetative digging, or early one August, a different year, when a needed vacation left the garden too dry and too weeded to recover, that my vision of a prolific mouthwatering garden would end abruptly.

 Reality is not as multidimensional as a vision of what may become with a little imagination. "It is what it is"; says the Earth. Backs do twist, bugs do come, weeds do grow and plants do whither.  Reality brings us "down to earth"? Doesn't it?   Funny the way that works.
 Visioning is what it takes to see where we can go. I can't help it. I still like to dream until I'm out there with only a shovel.  It's a lot of work!! But, other than the hard physical work, I've come to learn that it takes being well organized, attuned to the seasons, and anticipatory of what needs to be done well in advance of the season yet to come. I don't think my "real job" is this difficult.

Over time I have realized that I don't know how to "keep" a garden: i.e. "to cause it to continue..." (online dictionary source). Keeping a garden is a lesson about how our earth breaths, rests, recycles, rejuvinates, lives and has "cause to continue". It's an on going lesson. (No pun intended but I needed to get grounded on how to do this.) Simply put; it requires living it in order to be able to do it.

"Time to keep a garden" is about my humble efforts to try to "keep a garden". It is about what I (hope) to do each month throughout the 4 seasons, here in New England, to maintain, nourish, replenish, grow and harvest what I have sown. That is, on a small scale- a family sized one - without  huge farm equipment or commercial fertilizers.
( Is there such thing as a "family garden", anymore?  What does that look like? It seems like we either become awesome organic farmers or saavy organic food consumers. There's no time to garden. Our patio pot of basil -that we sometimes have to rotate to keep in the sun- may be our only evidence of "a garden". Oh, I don't mean to be critical. I love my patio pot(s) of basil!)
But, why bother???

It is time to keep a garden because it is time to know. It's time to learn and share through experience and observation with keeping: "the action to hold as one's own".  That is we need to know how to keep our gardens, and ultimately, we must learn how to keep our earth. It is time.

 Our earth is crying out. It is changing. Is it from our neglect or abuse? Is there something more happening, that we don't understand? I think we need to just "be there" to know what's happening. I mean go there. Look at the ground you stand on, the forest floor, the soil, it's rocks and the water that flows over them. Go take a hike. How about take a hike around your yard? What animals live there and why? What kind of "bugs" are around there? Where do they come from and why? Do you have worms in your soil?  See any good edible mushrooms? I've noticed that there are more Aminitas, the poisonous ones, than edible ones in our nearby forest. Why are the edible ones not as prolific? What about what we don't see?  What birds live here and choose to visit? What plants, bugs, flowers or seed are they attracted to?  What plants used to grow where your yard is now? I'm asking that question with our soil, here, now, because in some places its very wet with underlying granite and clay and in other places it is sandy hard and dry. Old stone walls line half of our sloping field and it's been cleared for awhile. Likely the field and it's sod supplied animals with grazing rather than vegetables, as a good guess. I need to research this more.

What does ecology have to do with agriculture? Everything. For now, I simply understand that it is interwined. One speaks to the other. The "family farm" was a self-sustaining agro-ecosystem. Here in New England, at one time, and long ago, 40% of our population were family farms. They were small.  We grew locally, for most foods. Perhaps we shipped in, for a few other foods. It worked. Didn't it?

It is time to keep a garden, no matter how big or how small. It doesn't matter where it is; on the deck or next to the sidewalk or in the front yard because that's where the sun is. It's time to take the time.  At least, I'm going to continue to take the time and walk through the seasons day by day. This time I hope to take you along, as an observer, a gardener, a naturalist, a steward of the land, and as a learner of what is. I would love to know what you have observed, discovered, uncovered, dug, staked, wired, caged, composted, grown, pulled, picked, harvested, put up, froze, fermented, squeezed or canned. Never mind all the wildlife that comes around to check it all out. Maybe we'll learn something we didn't know before together.


"October was the time to make cider and pumpkin moonshines. And what exciting Halloween parties we had!" (from; "A Time to Keep" by Tasha Tudor)