Of Leeks, Cucumber Memories and a Clean Fall Garden

Visited Smith on Sunday, a fine, Fall afternoon, to dig sweet potatoes and couldn’t believe what all else was ready, too.  I picked a half dozen honorable Anaheims, a mildly hot pepper we pickle and like for cooking because it adds a bit of a zip without knocking your socks off.  Also picked a green pepper and several pepperoncinis, those yellow peppers you get with pizzas or with salads in Greek or Italian restaurants.  I even picked some late-summer planted radishes.

Late October Harvest

I also picked one leek from the twenty or so growing there.  I planted leek seeds, part of the bag of 2010 seeds my aunt gave me, long ago in early spring.  Those sturdy and unassuming members of the onion family have been quietly growing ever since, watching lettuce come and go, enduring a wet spring, a hot, dry summer, and an August hurricane, being infiltrated by squash vines and squash, (though not overcome), and now, along with marigolds, royal castor beans (seven feet tall and wide, great, deep-red fans on thick stalks) and a few pepper plants have become the last man standing.  We picked a leek and cooked it (oh so good!).  My goal and challenge is to preserve some until January when we make Cockaleekie Soup for Burns Supper.  I am absolutely determined Smith’s leeks will be in that soup.  In November or December I will mound soil around the stalks, a winter coat to ward off freezing temperatures, so I can pick them directly from the garden in January.

Squash infiltrating the leeks, but...

After this fun October harvest, I spent at least two vigorous hours tidying up Smith.  Pulling weeds, especially from an open garden space (as opposed to from among plants), is an exhilarating garden task.  I expend a different sort of energy than from other exercise.  When the bed was clear, I laid four or five inches of leaf mold over the area, ready for me to turn under next spring, re-raising the bed to the height I want it.  Raised beds keep sinking year after year and need an annual facelift.

Back home, I spent an hour working in the Lorelei, banishing weeds, picking the last mess of beans, and pulling the now thoroughly dried cucumber vines.  What good friends they had become.  It was hard saying goodbye.  I should have kept count, a tally of the abundance they offered us.  In my mind, we easily picked fifty cucumbers, maybe more.  We used a dozen of those to make 6 pints of Bread and Butter pickles.  The rest, we ate raw and fresh in salads, in vinegar with onions, on sandwiches and as snacks.  What joy, yes, really joy, bringing cucumber after cucumber from the front yard into the kitchen.

Cucmber memories!

A cleaned and cleared garden in October has a certain satisfying look.  There’s nothing  but the soil, a few traces of the plants that had grown there, and the memory of its abundance.  It surprises me not one bit that stubble fields make their way into Fall poems.  In “To Autumn” Keats writes: “While barred clouds bloom the soft dying day and touch the stubble fields with rosy hue.”  James Whitcomb Riley in “When the Frost is on the Punkin’” uses the image of bare, stubble fields to teach a lesson:

The stubble in the furries kinda lonesome-like but still,
A preachin’ sermons to us of the barns they growed to fill.

On this cool blue fall day I am a contented member of that congregation, listening to my garden’s homily on the abundance it shared and the rest that awaits it.