I began this draft to gloat & to tease our family & friends in the East & Midwest a bit, because we still had the gift of numerous lingering blooms to show off even at winter solstice in our soggy garden.
We had rather warmish weather last autumn, even as we have slogged through a very soggy December, but even that did not completely squelch the gift of lingering blooms at Solstice in our garden.
A bit earlier the leeks began to bloom a bit contorted under the overhanging kale & we continue to enjoy this “arrangement” as it is maintaining rather well after Christmas…
Perhaps
it visually exemplifies the chaotic times in which we’ve been living
for the last three late summer/autumnal months while we were enduring
the maddening schedule of the painters, whose blithe ignorance of
civility left us stranded inside their messes during the season we would
ordinarily most enjoy our outdoor living spaces, and share them with
Covid-protected friends.
We are finally liking the result of
radically changing colors & tone even as it has altered the
character of our house with its previously rather raw yellow, more
weathered, cedar siding story. It has become something more “stately”
& certainly more grounded. Which welcomes this soggy season.
I’ve
been fantasizing adding a stripe on the foundation of the same blue as
the rocking chair Stephen prepped to live on the deck of his writing
cottage:
Impulsively, as he does, Stephen planted sunflowers quite late… with a prayer which was answered, if a bit raggedly in December.
Calendula,
a visual cousin, is a long-time edible favorite. But… a new variety
grown this year is too raucously colored & spiky in configuration
for my taste… I will have to weed it out… or learn to love it!
Another
golden colored bloom with which we hope toward a similarly eventual
problem of proliferation… the California poppy which reseeded this year
in an unlikely shady spot on the north side of the house…
In the Northwest our seasons are less a deterrant than in the rest of
the country, our climate being distantly touched by the Japan current
out in the Pacific… albeit a hundred miles away… & with the
Cascades, a fair mountain range, protecting the benignity of our
in-between… deep in the lower Puget Sound, which is a fjord, whose
jagged shoreline follows the topography of another submerged mountain
chain wallowing in a backwater… all on a rather grand scale!
Below
the dead stems in this photo is the new growth of Cardoon, a French
relative of the artichoke which blooms a striking blue-purple thistle
not really edible. The stems of the leaves can be cooked… but they are
not a favorite on our table.
Blooms of light reflected on the windows of the city across the water are favorites during sunsets…
Such blossoms are also treasured in our garden!
Various varieties of kale will feed us
through the winter, even though they are almost a year old, being all
spring-planted & having survived the summer heat. I might have
acquired later, younger plants from the nursery when they were
available, but that was right when we were beginning to become involved
with the painting project which was supposed to take only 3 weeks
instead of 3 months.
Lacinato
is one of our favorites, sometimes marketed as “dinosaur kale;” it has a
gorgeous deep green color & a texture with rich flavor.
Mache is an early green which can begin to sprout from seeds I try to get sown all around the garden to grow wherever it wishes. It has a unique nutty flavor & is a favorite addition to salads… but, even better all alone when there is enough.
Wasabi
arugula has repeatedly reseeded in one bed… which has a sharp whack of
flavor for salad, but the blossoms are more mellow…
The last & most dramatic harvest from the Solstice period is mashua, a variety of nasturtium which is a Peruvian root crop. It becomes a beautifully vigorous vine with small late blossoms, all of which are edible, but the tubers are spicy & fun to eat raw & sliced thin, like a “winter radish’, but some folk do not like it at all! When cooked in a stir-fry or roasted it becomes soft & almost sweet. It is another unusual favorite I came to know in Sonoma County.
Solstice is the true holiday I celebrate at the year’s turning. It punctuates the gardening season with a sigh of closing & a new breath to begin, or continue, the annual cycle, so I leave this to share in the second part the beginnings of spring in the garden…
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