First Frost

May 20, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

The grass sparkled in the beam from my headlamp this morning and crunched underfoot—our long-overdue first frost. After such a hot summer, we should have expected a warm autumn, but I was beginning to wonder if it would ever frost; it usually occurs near the end of April.

Of course, even without a frost it’s been too cool for the summer crops outside the greenhouse; they gave up weeks ago. So we’ve been eating as though it has already frosted, but there’s something decisive about the first frost.

First frost gives me permission to haul out the sewing machine after a summer’s interruption to crafts. It encourages me to pull out a good book. It gives me leave to contemplate steaming pots of soup and chunky vegetable stews for dinner. It is a milestone in the year. A time for taking stock, reflecting on the summer’s crops, and enjoying a brief break from most garden chores. Though the garden looks wasted and sad after the first frost, it is a time to savour, like every other event and milestone in the garden year.

Be a Greenhouse Maker

May 19, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

This afternoon when I went out to the greenhouse for tomatoes, I got to thinking about the protection that a greenhouse offers. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that we all use greenhouses, and the best of us create them.

The greenhouse is a refuge for those tropical plants we love so much—tomatoes, peppers, and basil. My unheated tunnel can’t protect the plants from a hard freeze, but it protects them from frost and gives them just enough extra warmth to ripen up those last autumn fruits. It also protects tender seedlings from fickle spring weather.

Not everyone has a greenhouse for vegetables, but we all make use of metaphorical greenhouses.

We provide greenhouses for our kids. We try to protect them just enough to give them extra time to grow and mature until they’re ready to brave the elements alone. We provide them a refuge—a place where they are loved, accepted, and safe from emotional and physical harm.

But it’s not just children who need metaphorical greenhouses. We adults need them, too. Yesterday, my son interviewed me for a school assignment about the factors that help us to be resilient in the face of adversity. It struck me that a large part of being resilient is having a refuge, a “greenhouse” that will take the edge off harsh conditions.

We can make greenhouses for others. When the earthquakes struck in Christchurch, neighbours created greenhouses for one another by pitching in wherever they could—shovelling liquefaction, sharing food, and offering shoulders to cry on. My husband has provided a greenhouse of unwavering support as I muddle through my current emotionally fraught career change.

We can make greenhouses for ourselves, too—places (physical or mental) where we allow ourselves to rest, where we cultivate things that bring us comfort.

When we make greenhouses for our kids, our friends, and ourselves, we all take shelter in them. So go ahead, be a greenhouse maker.

An Orderly Work Space

May 18, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

My “new” 125 year-old garden shed.

With my husband’s new shop all but finished, he’s been shifting all his tools from the old shop. The shift prompted the shuffling and rearranging of not just his tools, but also my gardening tools and supplies, and my teaching resources and crafts in my office. A shelf unit from my office went to the new shop, and a cupboard went to the “new” garden shed (the old shop). I got new cupboards for the office that are a better fit for the space, and we all spent the entire weekend rearranging and organising stuff in all three work spaces. Cleaned out things we don’t use anymore, discovered things we thought we’d lost, and arranged work spaces so that the tools and materials we need are easy to find and convenient to use.

After nearly ten years saying we were going to do this reorganisation (and being sidetracked by more important issues like leaking roofs, rotted house piles, and disintegrating weatherboards), I’m thrilled to see our work spaces coming together the way we’d like them to. There is still a lot of work to do to finish the job, but I can already see I’m going to appreciate having my seed-starting trays and pots in an enclosed space so they don’t blow off the shelves every time we have a storm. I’m going to enjoy having my garden tools neatly hung on the wall, and my pots and potting mix arranged for efficiency, not just stashed wherever I could make them fit.

Makes me want to go out and plant something, just for the pleasure of using a well ordered shed.

Carrots

May 7, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

I eat them almost every night in dinner, and usually with lunch, and often in between meals, too. Nothing satisfies my munchies like the sweet juicy crunch of a carrot. I know I’d automatically reach for cake over carrots, if I could get it, but cake is like riding the crest of a big wave on your boogie board—a thrill while it lasts, but pretty soon you’re going to be washed up on the sand. Cake’s sugar crash can be brutal, but carrots are both satisfying and sustaining.

I could go on about carrots’ nutritional values—how they contain lots of vitamin A, C, and K, how they are low in calories and high in fibre. But frankly, I don’t care. They are delicious and satisfy my snacking cravings; who cares about the rest?

I grow a lot of carrots, but never enough to get us through the year. My favourite variety is Touchon, a sweet orange carrot that grows beautifully in my garden. I also plant Purple Dragon, Solar Yellow, and Nutri-Red, just for fun and variety.

I love braised carrots, roasted carrots, grilled carrots, carrots in soup, carrots in my macaroni and cheese, and carrots in salad. But mostly I love carrot sticks, eaten any time of day or night, whenever I’m feeling a little peckish.

Habitat Gym

May 5, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

I want to open a gym. I’ll call it the Habitat gym. But instead of rowing machines, treadmills and weights, my gym will have shovels, hammers and hoes. Members will get fit by growing food for the local food bank, or by building low-cost housing or community amenities.

Trainers will match the job to the member—Want to work on your cardiovascular fitness? You’ll fetch tools and materials for the work crews, running back and forth from shed to building site or garden. Keen on weight training? You’ll be mixing cement or turning soil. Just want some gentle stretching and strengthening? You can weed or paint.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could capture all the human energy wasted every year at the gym and funnel it into meaningful projects that help others? Not only would people stay fit, they might be more likely to stick with their exercise regime if they know that what they are doing is meaningful and not just drudgery, if at the end of a year long gym membership, they count their success not just in pounds shed or muscle mass gained, but also in people fed and housed. If all that energy expended at the gym were harnessed for good, think what we could accomplish!

Organising the Tools

May 4, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

As my husband’s new shop takes shape, I am gradually moving my gardening things into their new home in the old shop. Yesterday, my daughter and I arranged the large hand tools, each with its own spot on the wall of the shed. She even drew each tool on the wall in its designated spot, so that they would always be put away in the right places. It is the first time I have ever had my tools neatly arranged, so they aren’t snarled in a hopeless tangle of rake tines whenever I need something. Of course, it only works if the tools are put away. Now, where did that sword go?…

Salad Junkie

April 28, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Lots of parents fret about their teenagers’ eating habits. Given the freedom and a little pocket money, most teens make bad food choices. I can’t judge—I was one of those teens once, splurging on chocolate and Coca-Cola every chance I got. My son is no different, though his vices tend toward the salty side—chips and cheesy breads.

But I don’t worry. He thinks I’ll reprimand him for the empty chip bag that comes home in his lunchbox (he didn’t get them from home…), but I know that his real weakness is salad.

Yep, salad. With a homemade vinaigrette, and plenty of dark, nutty lettuces and spinach. Maybe some nasturtium flowers for colour and a little zing…

He eyes the salad bowl after everyone has had seconds, waiting to see if his sister will fight him for what’s left. She often does, and I would, too, except that my parental instinct is to let them gorge on salad. Rarely is there anything left when the table is cleared.

How did it happen, this salad craving? I have no idea, except that our salads aren’t iceberg lettuce and an anaemic slice of greenhouse tomato. They have flavour and colour. The kids know the names of all the varieties of lettuce I plant, and they enjoy the range of “extras” we add, like nasturtium, salad burnet, and parsley.

“I like that drunk lady,” my son said one day after polishing off the salad greens, “It’s so…succulent.” He was referring to Drunken Woman Fringed Head—one of our reliable year-round lettuces (but that won’t stop me from using the quote as blackmail someday). How can a kid not like lettuce with a name like that?

So, let them have a few chips and some chocolate. I know that they’ll come home and stuff themselves with salad. That’s serious junk food!

Migratory Chickens

April 25, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

The chickens migrated to the vegetable garden today.

My chickens are migratory; they have a summer home and a winter home. In summer they have a dedicated paddock—an otherwise useless little corner of the yard under some birch trees. Their winter home is the vegetable garden. I fence off a quarter of the space for my winter crops, and let the chooks take care of the rest.

I used to struggle with waist-high weeds in the garden each spring, injuring my back or my arms almost every year just trying to prepare the garden for planting. But since I started employing the chickens in the garden over winter, spring planting has become a breeze.

Well, OK, not a breeze. It’s still a ton of work, but I can do it without injury.

The chickens eat weeds and pests alike, keeping both under control all winter. There are weeds they won’t eat, of course, but as long as I swing through the garden once or twice over the winter to root out the biggest ones, I arrive at spring with minimal weeds or pests to get rid of.

And the icing on the cake is that the chooks love the garden. Egg production often slows down in the autumn, but it shoots right up again when the birds are let loose among the leftover vegetables. Everybody wins!

Autumn

April 23, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Autumn

Is a yearning

Wreathed in smoke,

Struck through

With the amber rays

Of a westering sun.

Autumn

Is a farewell,

The caress

Of soft wind,

A sigh

Of leaves.

Autumn

Is anticipation:

Wood shed full

Of logs

Awaiting the fire,

Windows

Waiting to be closed,

Tomatoes

Awaiting their first

And final

Trimming of frost.

Surprises

April 22, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

We have been eating jalapeños from the garden for months now. I’ve pickled tons of them, we’ve had them on burgers, in pasta sauce, in burritos…so the other day, as I was slicing one for on pizza, I popped a generous slice in my mouth, expecting the mild heat of all the others we’ve eaten.

Boy, was I in for a surprise! I may as well have eaten a Thai hot pepper! For some reason, this jalapeño was screaming hot. My eyes began to water, I started to hiccup from the heat, all the while laughing at myself. It was half an hour before my mouth settled down to a mild tingle from the fiery pain of that pepper.

The remainder of the pepper went straight into the compost—I didn’t want any spice at all on my pizza that night! I have treated the jalapeños with more respect since then.

It’s not the first time I’ve been surprised by spice. In Peace Corps, we regularly had training events at a nearby Girl Scout camp. The camp cook always set a huge jar of homemade hot sauce on the table. The size of the jar was deceptive—served in that quantity, it couldn’t be very spicy, right? The first time, I took a large spoonful and stirred it into my beans. I wondered if I’d ever recover! A tiny bit of that hot sauce was enough to bring tears to my eyes—it was nothing but ground up habañeros. I have to wonder if the cook didn’t do it on purpose in order to laugh at all of us with smoke coming out of our ears! It was a good joke, but not a surprise I want frequently.