I'm Dreaming of a White...Halloween?!

Perhaps you've seen the commercial for Birds' Eye frozen vegetables, where people are picking bright, ripe peppers in the snow. One of my students asked me just this week if that could really happen, and I laughed. Boy, am I eating my words now.Brian and I went out this morning to salvage the rest of our crop. Yes, we are picking TOMATOES in the SNOW.

Next, we harvested the sweet potatoes.

Not bad for a first try at growing them! I think I'll bake this one in the oven tonight, to go with a steak...that is, if we keep the power on. The heavy, wet snow is causing tree branches to come down all over our township (poor trees!), and the power has cut off a few times already.
The rain barrel needs to be emptied before it freezes, so I used some of the water to rinse off the sweet potatoes. As a bonus, we found some more blue potatoes that I missed the last time!
These are some coral bells and little bluestem grasses in our front garden. They make me sad like this, all squished and drooped over. The blueberry plants are almost buried and the mums are wearing a cap of white.

It creates cognitive dissonance to see Halloween decorations and hear the sound of snow shoveling at the same time around here. However, I will use this opportunity to add to my forecasting knowledge of coastal storms, slip my feet into my favorite alpaca socks, and try to make sense of trees resplendent in fall color yet iced in snow.

Summer Became the Fall

It's a beautiful Indian summer day - if you allow me to be politically incorrect and use a term from my youth - and a great day to work in the garden. It may be almost 80 out, but autumn is progressing in the garden and, in the process, is providing for the wintering creatures in the yard.
The blueberry plants we put in this spring are completely cloaked in their fall color. Multiply this by the hundreds, and add a yellow canopy of trees, and you have sections of the northwestern New Jersey forest in just a couple weeks.

The switchgrass has a cloud of burgundy seedheads atop the blue foliage. I'm wondering who will eat the seeds this winter. Lots of people cut off seed heads to make the garden look neater, but seed heads can provide interest in the winter - make the garden look less sterile - and you never know who is getting welcome nourishment from your garden "mess."
The Joe-pye weed has traded its mauve flowers for the fluff of seed heads.
The garden is still providing people food this time of year. This is a flower on the sweet potatoes. The foliage is starting to yellow, which is an indication that the harvest is nearing.
I wish smell could be transferred via blog, because this harvest of basil has my kitchen smelling divinely. It's really important to harvest basil before even a light frost, because they are reduced to a black mush in cold temperatures. I'll wash these on the stem and hang them to dry. They store well in an airtight bag or plastic container.

It's time to get some mums for the front of the house and enjoy the remaining few weeks of tomatoes. We will put in the winter rye and plant next year's garlic in just a month. For now, though, I'm going to enjoy the warmth of the early fall sun and pretend winter will never come!

Butterfly Baby Boom

I became frustrated with the Eagles' lack of ability to win a game this past Sunday, so I went out to the garden instead. After picking some beets (which were delicious with red wine vinegar, oil, onion, and pepper tonight!), radishes, and cherry tomatoes, I wandered over to the carrots. Kneeling down, I found myself face to face with an eastern black swallowtail caterpillar. That's not unusual; we find a couple on the carrots every year. However, as my eyes adjusted, I saw more and more - 6 total! This type of butterfly likes to lay its eggs on parsley and plants in the carrot family, like dill, so we had the perfect environment for a bunch of kids to be born and grow.
This one is the first instar, or larvae. You can tell it by the white band around its middle.This one is a later instar. If you make it mad, two little snake-tongue-like protrusions come out on its end. As I like to keep our caterpillars happy, I look but don't touch.I watched this one's mouthparts eat up many carrot leaves. It looks pretty close to going to chrysalis. I've only ever seen one chrysalis in the garden, attached to the wood scaffolding to which I tie the tomato plants, and it didn't last the winter. I wonder where these will go, and if I will see them fluttering across the yard as adults next year.