I always forget how busy this time of year is in the garden. The season is definitely changing—shorter days, a different quality of light, a new smell to the air, and cooler nights even though days are sometimes still pretty warm. In the “old days” our average first frost date was October 8th, these days it’s moved to around October 20th. I always think I will get more time for the garden to be productive with this expanding fall period, but there comes a point when there is not enough daylight for plants to keep producing. Even cool weather vegetables need sunlight, as do the chickens to lay eggs, which is generally why they stop laying in winter, not because of the cold but because of the lack of daylight hours.

I’ve done research into “extending the growing season,” and there are many things I can do like grow tunnels, in which I can keep carrots and kale alive all winter. But the thing I also learned is that they will not grow, or not grow much. So I would have to plant them all now to get them growing big enough to eat, and the grow tunnels would essentially act as insulation for the live plants during the cold months so I can go out and dig through the snow and pick a carrot or fresh kale for dinner. Knowing I will absolutely not put on my boots and coat and snowpants to wade out into the garden when it’s -10F to harvest some carrots, I quickly gave up on the idea of extending the garden harvest season. Instead I am content to grow broccoli and alfalfa sprouts on my kitchen counter to add fresh greens to sandwiches and all that.

Which makes this time of year busy because one must spend time not only harvesting the produce, but preserving it. Preservation is not hard but it takes a lot of time depending on what you are doing. Canning, as we do with our apples in the form of apple sauce, apple butter, and at least one quart of apple pie filling, takes time and attention. Spend 20 minutes picking a 5 gallon bucket of apples, then spend several hours coring and (sometimes) peeling, and chopping, then another chunk of time cooking, and then another chunk of time preparing the jars and then canning. It’s a little less work to blanche green beans and pop them into the freezer, but we only have a small fridge/freezer combo (we’ve talked about getting a small box freezer in the basement but given the power grid may one day not be very reliable we’ve not gone there). So currently our small freezer is crammed to bursting.

While we’ve had a few 90F and close to 90F days, the truly hot, multi-day misery broke in early August. I thought, at last, I will get zucchini! Nope. My poor zucchini plants must have been greatly traumatized because they continue to produce only male flowers. However, the crookneck squash has begun producing female flowers in abundance and there is even a tiny squash! We’ll see how big these manage to get before it’s too late.

The pole beans—fortex and Kentucky wonder—are going gangbusters. I like the bush green beans well enough but they are a beany bridge between the end of the peas and the beginning of the pole beans. Not only do they taste good, the fortex has such a satisfying snap/crunch, but they are delightful plants to grow. Like zucchini when you see a small one not big enough to pick yet and then come back in a day or two and somehow it has become gigantic, the pole beans do this too. It never fails to surprise me and make me happy. This is how I end up being able to save bean seeds for next year’s garden.

I know I am supposed to choose the most vigorous plants with the most desirable qualities and mark them out for seed saving. But I never do. The seeds that get saved come from the beans that went from, oh look at the little bean pod to OMG when did it get so big? Because, while I suppose one can, one does not generally pick the pods with very developed beans in them to eat fresh. The pods tend to be tough and the beans rather chewy. This might not be the best bean seed saving strategy but it works for me.

We still haven’t dug the potatoes because the plants are still green and vigorous. Even after mounding them up several times, the plants have grown tall and are now sprawling. I suppose we could have kept mounding them up, but the mounds would be up to our knees at this point. I have never had potatoes grow so well before, so I must have done something really right this year. At least I hope so, I won’t know for sure until the plants die back and I dig down into the dirt to find out.

The non-mammalian and avian garden critters this year have been predominately arachnid. We’ve gone years without any big orb spiders and have had several this year. I admit, they are alarming with their large webs and big round bodies, but oh are they ever beautiful! There have also been lots of ground spiders of various kinds that I always apologize to when I am digging or weeding and disturb them, sending them scrambling away for cover. I know spiders give many people the heebie-jeebies, and I admit I am not completely immune to the startled fear of initial encounter, but oh, I do love them so, which is one reason why I have cobwebs in all the corners of my house. I let the spiders stay and only sweep away their webs after I am certain they are uninhabited. 

Lest you be concerned, we do not have black widow spiders here. We did in southern California where I grew up, and I can tell you, I am not friendly to them and I have crushed a few in my time. I think there are brown recluse spiders, or the possibility of them, but I have never seen one. No, only orb spiders and common garden spiders outdoors, and common house spiders and sometimes the little jumping spiders indoors. 

Besides the spiders, the crickets are chirruping almost nonstop these days, the cicadas are buzzing, and the bees are busy. I saw a very fat pollen-laden bumblebee stuck deep in a squash flower this morning and I cannot tell you what joy I felt at the sight. I love fat bumblebees so much. It think it’s their round fuzziness. I often have the urge to pet them, wondering if they would be soft or wiry. Since I will never actually act on my petting urge, I will never have an answer.

Last weekend I had a bit of an urban bike adventure. The Weaver’s Guild was having a sale of gently used weaving and spinning things as well as fiber that was either donated or leftover from class projects. I have never been there before. The weather was pleasant and the sun was shining on Saturday so off I went.

Now Google is pretty good for mapping bike routes, but this time, not so much. The bike trail I thought I was supposed to turn down was not the bike trail I did turn down, and when I got to the University of Minnesota I realized I was not where I was supposed to be. After a bit of orienting and wayfinding, getting mixed up in new student move in day at the U, and then having to bike for a few blocks on a very busy road with no bike lane, I finally made it in one piece to the Weaver’s Guild. 

They opened at 10, I got there around 11:30, and all the good equipment was gone. There were lots of pieces—shuttles, reeds, bobbins, some basic drop spindles, and things I don’t even know what they were—but nothing I could use. I had hoped to score some fiber carders to use on my nettle fiber, but I was too late.

There was still lots of fiber though. There were some big bags of mohair that were a bargain. I have never seen unspun mohair though and I couldn’t tell if it was ready to spin or not. I can say it was very crinkly/wavy, undyed, and silky soft. I was so tempted to buy a bag but knew it was beyond my beginner spinning skills. I did get a 4 ounce bag of ready to spin merino wool though that had been dyed a pretty lilac for only $5!

My other score was a cone each of navy blue and gray unmercerized 8/2 cotton for weaving. I want to try to weave kitchen towels and, unbeknownst to me at the time, I got the exactly correct kind and weight of yarn. The cones had not been opened and were half the price they would normally have cost. Woo hoo! 

Now all I need is a loom. It seems like a rigid heddle loom would be the most convenient, but I am not prepared at this point to invest a few hundred dollars, so I am trying to figure out what I can do instead. While I have instructions to make my own backstrap loom, I am not quite ready to make something so involved. I am considering a basic frame loom from either cardboard or scrap wood, or a cardboard table loom, which I would have to secure to the table when weaving, so I might try the frame loom first. I just need to figure out how big to make it and then also come up with the rest of the equipment like a shuttle, which will probably be made from cardboard. It’s going to be fun!

Getting home from the Weaver’s Guild was also a bit of an adventure. I started back on the route that Google had told me to take when getting there. This ended up being a zig-zagging hilly residential street that went up and down and all around. I found the bike trail Google had told me to take—it was a very steep, narrow strip of asphalt barely wide enough for one bike, that was overgrown with bushes and cracked and lumpy and broken up by tree roots. It was unmarked, hidden behind a bunch of weeds, and frankly, not safe to ride on. So I am happy I got lost and wasn’t even tempted to try riding up it. As it was, to avoid riding down it I had to stick to the street, which itself was extremely steep and had a stop sign at the bottom of it that I carefully and slowly rolled through (turning right into a marked bike lane) because if I had actually stopped I would have fallen over, the pitch was that bad. 

I made it home with my treasures without further incident. I love a good adventure! I am kind of glad all the equipment had been sold already because if there had been a heddle loom for a cheap price I probably would have bought, tying it to my backpack to get it home. As it was, there were three small spinning wheels there, one of them partially folded up, and for a second I wondered could I …? The thing that kept me from wondering further was not the challenge of hauling it home on my regular non-cargo bike, but that I have no idea how to use a spinning wheel and I am not all that certain that I want to. I enjoy spinning on my spindles, they are slow and I am not good at it, but I like the slowness. Plus, a spindle is pretty basic and there are no moving parts that break and it takes up no real space at all. Still, could I have gotten home with a spinning wheel? Maybe I will find out one day, but for now it will remain a mystery.

Reading

• Book: Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy. The first book is more of a novella and was good but I wasn’t wowed. About halfway through the second one I started to get really into it, and now in the third one I am loving it and have a hard time putting it down.
• Book: Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle by Jody Rosen. Only a couple chapters in, and I am enjoying it quite a lot.

Listening

• Podcast: Weaving Voices: The Economic Waters We Swim In. An interview with Jason Hickel, economic anthropologist and author of Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. A really interesting conversation about how we need to change our economy from one predicated on eternal growth to one based on small and local.
• Podcast: Local Futures: Mental Health in the Global Economy with Gabor Maté. A few months ago I read, and found valuable, Maté’s book, Scattered, about ADHD. He has a new book coming out soon for which I am already in the holds queue at my library. This was a really interesting conversation, especially since lately I have been thinking more and more about how one might manage to “drop out” of our fossil-fueled neoliberal capitalist society, or at the very least, work to subvert it. There are no answers here, but lots of food for thought.
• Podcast: The Great Simplification: Kris De Decker: Low Tech: What, Why, and How. Decker is the man behind Low Tech Magazine. This was a great conversation about high tech versus low tech, about being aware of the choices we make regarding technology, and about what sort of realistic technology future we can expect and the low-tech skills we should all be trying to learn (hint: grow your own food is at the top of the list).

Watching

• Thor: Love and Thunder. One of the things I have always enjoyed about the Thor movies is the campy humor and this is definitely not short of that! There are screaming goats, plenty of jokes, and a nice scene with some naked Thor butt *smirk*