spring visiting

Yesterday was such a social day on the island. In the morning Peter and Sherry came over to the island, and came by for a visit. A dark-eyed junco made a flying house call.
Actually, many song sparrows and juncos spent the day settling in after their long trip back to the island. They twittered about unpacking their bags and checking out the menu at local diner (which is the same menu as last year).
The sheep came by to greet the returning birds.
Blake and Ashley came by. They brought lobster from Blake's dad Skipper, and stayed for a visit. Later Skipper himself came by, with mussels and eggs. We really don't need to go to the store.
At the end of the day Greg sat in his favourite place and appreciated the beginning of spring.

insects of the sea

Our friends Skipper and Radar dropped by for tea on their way home from lobstering the other day. They brought us our dinner, too! After four years here it's still amazing that we can sit down and eat lobsters as fresh as this. Skipper and Radar say the lobster season hasn't been good, though. The weather even in December -- usually the best month -- was horrible for lobstering, with some major storms. Maybe things will pick up in May, when the waters are warmer. In the meantime, Skipper says "We are a non-profit organization."

Well, especially if they give away the catch before they even get back to their wharf.

supper time

We were at the lighthouse today, and saw many boats far out on the horizon. Once in a while one would come close enough to have her picture taken as she rounded Cape Roseway on her way up the eastern channel.The gulls are delighted that lobster season has begun, and follow the boats hoping for odds and ends of leftover bait that might be tossed overboard. Supper for gulls.

And supper for us, too. No, not leftover bait. We were stacking wood for winter of 2012 when we spied the H. Sinclair coming toward the cove. Greg grabbed a yellow plastic pail and walked down to meet Radar and Skipper while I followed with frosted applesauce cake.
They tied up at the dock long enough to give us three lobsters and eat cake.
After a bit of a chat, they were on their way. They would have lots more to do before their day was finished and they could have their own supper.

cranberry walkabout

On the south side of the island, hoping for cranberries, I picked up the ghostly track of an ATV. Maybe it was our own from this time last year. I doubt if anyone has come there since. I followed it, walking through a low scrum of bayberry and juniper and cotton grass and dried fern, around stands of spruce and up a gentle crest. Surrounded by the forest and the sea and hidden in a low place, the bog becomes visible only when you are upon it. Like so much on the island, if you don't know where to look you will only discover it by accident. And if, having found it, you fail to take sufficient note of where you are, you may not find it again.

Once I was in the bog I tiptoed about in my rubber boots, a curious giantess, and bent down and squatted so I could peer closely at this world. Everywhere I looked I saw the basal leaves of the pitcher plant, plump veined red teacups. Each one now held a thimble-full of some dark shining brew. The pitcher plant seems to have had a very good year in this bog. I might have come upon the last touches for an end-of-season tea-party about to be tossed by the local fairies for a few invited flies. While I admired the cunning place-settings, the guests, abuzz, were at home donning their iridescent wings and polishing their heads.

Even though it is a small enough place -- maybe four or five acres altogether -- and even though you can see all the way across it no matter where you are standing, still, it's easy to lose your way in the bog. Somehow you are never quite where you had thought you were. You look up from peering into its watery pathways and glinty pools and rumpled velvet moss to find yourself somewhere else entirely. How did I get over here when I was just over there, you wonder. I think there may be some shape-shifting that befalls the bog visitor, which can be disconcerting unless you begin to go with it.

It is easy to forget that, like a reasonable person, I have come here for a reason. I remember from last year's search that to see these cranberries I will need to adjust my expectations. I won't be looking for the colour we call cranberry. Instead, I'm after a glimpse of dull purplish bloom only a few shades darker than the pitcher plant's teacups. I remember Peter's rule for seeing whales in the summer. "Go up to the lighthouse four or five times in July," he said, "and look out to sea, and I guarantee you, if you do that four or five times, on one of those trips you'll see a whale."

Peter's rule applies to cranberries too (and maybe to other things as well). I spied one, then another, then another, until I had gathered a handful in my cupped palm. If I bent down to look four or five times, on one of those times I'd begin to find them lying quietly about here and there, attached to a delicate green thread, a dark jewel set on a bracelet of tiny green leaves, bog treasure.

preserved

Greg has been very industrious in the department of canning.

He has made apple butter, three kinds of apple sauce, pear chutney, apple chutney, grape jam, strawberry preserves, apple jelly, and pickled peppers. I love to stand in the breezeway and admire it all. I'm especially entranced by four quart jars of brandied whole pears.

We picked the pears two weeks ago and they are gradually becoming ripe enough to use. After they are off the tree, they take a while to ripen and you just have to guess how they are doing since they keep it under their hats. Then they are perfect for a day or two, but secretly, then they descend into mealy blandness followed quickly by mushy rottenness. Also they are individualists and do not do any of this evolving as a group. So if you have, say, two or three hundred pears you will have two or three hundred different schedules for becoming mush.

But this year, for the first time, we have finally begun to outsmart the pears. So now besides the brandied pears and the pear chutney there are pear tarts in the freezer and fresh pears to eat and soon pear cider, which is called perry, which is so clever since this house was built by Perrys.

a most bountiful bounty

Eleanor and Ira, who have a camp on the eastern side of the island near the lighthouse, came by for a visit this week. Ira brought me some scarlet runner beans from his garden at home on Cape Sable Island. They are for planting in my garden next summer. What an inspiration! These beans make me want to pay more attention to all the seeds I plant next year. I think as I'm narrowing down what I want to plant I'll be able to get everything I need from Nova Scotia seed companies. That would be another step toward local eating.

I haven't finished putting this year's garden to bed yet. There are still tomatoes ripening out there, potatoes to be dug, red kale, dill, a late harvest of mesclun (and -- oh, no! more beans) and even a bit of summer squash.

Our freezer is packed with squash soup and various other delicious meals already made, and swiss chard and collards and kale and of course serious amounts of beans, as well as island foods that came from beyond the garden:

applesauce, dehydrated apples, apple tarts, apple bread, fresh apple cider, wild raspberries, chanterelles, mackerel and mutton.

And, from off the island, these fabulous wild blueberries Skipper brought back all the way from Advocate Harbour. It's almost ridiculous how well we eat. We do spend a lot of time growing, foraging, harvesting and processing. But that's all part of the interest and fun.

grape harvest

Elizabeth Hyde planted our grape vine, long ago: a concord, I think. After Elizabeth died the house and the land more or less went to sleep, but those vines continued to grow along the ground up where she had her big vegetable garden. Skipper, who always kept an eye on things, built a wooden fence around them to keep the sheep and deer from plundering them. So when we first arrived, the vines lay tangled and forlorn inside and over the remains of a weather-beaten wooden fence.

After our first year we took down that old fence and included the vines inside the new vegetable garden. Ambitiously, Greg built an arbour for the grapes. We pruned them and trained them, sort of. But there was only so much we could do besides tearing out the single huge trunk and starting over. Which I wasn't that interested in. The arbour was pretty enough in the garden's second summer, with its vines growing this way and that and its translucent leafy canopy. Last year we got maybe a cup of grapes, and Greg made one little jar of grape jam. I figured we had built the arbour for the benefit of our bird friends, and I left it at that.

This year I paid no attention to the grape arbour. As summer went on some vines got too long and started hitting me in the face as I walked into the garden, so I whacked them off. But that was as far as any pruning went. Gradually, though, I started noticing that there were clusters of grapes forming here and there. Oh well, I thought, the birds will be happy this year. I did not get my hopes up. I barely looked at the arbour. After all, I had collards to consider, and chard, and beans. Important things.

Quietly, behind my back, the grapes grew.

This past week was apple harvesting time around here. The big-time action was all in the apple trees, but in the middle of the week Greg mentioned that he thought the grapes were ready to harvest, too.
So I picked the grapes, about four and a half gallons once I took them off their stems.

Though we should have been putting two and two together all along, the bounty of the grape arbour caught us off guard. I had thought that the birds would swoop in at the last and stage a gigantic avian grape-fest, and that whatever we got would be an afterthought, their leftovers. But now instead we had oh-so-much of a good thing, requiring immediate attention. The rushing torrent of apple momentum would have to wait.

Jam was what we aspired to, not merely jelly. Not something smooth and simple and jelly-like, but something dense, more complex. But it turns out that jam -- as opposed to jelly -- is complicated to make. There are many time-consuming steps. These are the ones I did: taking the grapes off the stems, then separating the pulp from the skin of each and every grape. So that you end up with a pot of pulp, called must, and a separate bowl of skins. As far as I know there is no machine for doing this, or at least not at our house.

After that I turned everything over to Greg. I can't even tell you how many steps came next, since I stayed out of the kitchen. There were many, many steps, involving rarely-used and mysterious equipment and supplies. All evening, until midnight, the kitchen was filled with the purple aroma of grapes and the reading out loud of snippets from various recipes pulled off the Internet, which sounded like nothing so much as the muttering of charms and spells.

This morning I came downstairs to discover magic jars of grape jam, more than I can count, a rich dark colour amidst the brightness of the apple harvest.

rainy day activities

Earl turned out to be a bit of a blowhard, but it was a good day to be indoors. The kitchen was a peaceful place today, and smelled pretty heavenly. Greg added three cups of blueberries to the first batch of applesauce.
This applesauce maker is a brilliant invention, as you can see.
Jars of blueberry applesauce.Unadorned applesauce, incredibly good. Also, apple butter is in the crockpot ...
...then there's this apple tart with apricot glaze.
The hens thought maybe we would invite them in for applesauce.

welcome to bean world

The beans are flourishing, and I am beginning to think maybe I planted too many of them. There are two trellises of pole beans and two beds of bush beans. The bush bean seed packet contained a few random pole beans put there by some trickster seed packet packer somewhere, so there are also pole beans sprawling around among their more upright and conscientious relatives and making awkward late night take-over moves, ambitious climbers with no place to go.The horizontal cross bar on one of the trellises -- an eight foot long 2"x 2" milled from island spruce -- sagged and sagged until at last it snapped in half under the weighty morass of twisted vines, spreading leaves and dangling beans. I don't care, though.
Every other morning I work my way around this trellis, parting a dense jungle of leaves and dodging bees to peer as deeply into bean world as I dare. The challenge is making sense of such manic, burgeoning complexity. I can only see parts of beans amid fractured shards of shadow and sunlight. They are rarely dangling properly as they are supposed to, more often wedged up behind the trellis netting or lolling across a twisted bunch of leaves. Some of them do hide in plain sight, growing larger and larger until even the most distracted seeker could find them, gigantic foot-long beans, cartoon beans, beans guaranteed to get your attention no matter what.
I begin my every-other morning bean harvest with a slow, patient, systematic search for normal-size beans. Be mindful, I tell myself. Be Zen-like. Appreciate the beans. Let the beans be your teacher. But pretty soon my disciplined approach breaks down into something primitive, Lord of the Flies-ish. Even though it's early, the garden is hot, and there are mosquitoes about, and my hands have a mind of their own. Half way around the trellis they assert themselves, not at all mindfully. Whatever they locate by accident, they take. Whatever they miss, they miss and don't even know it. My hands are in a hurry, and greedy. They are focused on the bottom line. So many beans! they think. Let's get this over with. My hands get impatient and they don't look back.

Later we eat a few of these many, many beans, which Greg has sautéed in olive oil with garlic and tomatoes. Briefly, I manage to allow a tiny sliver of amazement. What we are eating here -- what is giving us sustenance and keeping us from hunger -- these green beans, our daily bread -- came directly into our kitchen and thence onto our supper plates from the combination of seeds and dirt and sun and water and season: a miraculous harvest, even if there's a part of me that takes it for granted every single time.

picking peas

I pick a cup or so of sugar snap peas every morning now, and every morning the pea vines have gotten taller. Now they arch beyond the trellis, which is five feet high. To reach the highest pods tomorrow, I'll need to get on a rickety chair -- a derelict wooden one that's lost its back and is spending its last days waiting to be of some use in the garden. When I snap a pod dangling above my head, the fine early morning mist that still hangs about the vine and leaves showers down on my face, an island version of a beauty treatment in more ways than one.

I wasn't thinking when I decided to put the trellis along the outer edge of a bed. The peas are easy to harvest from that side, but if I want to reach the ones that hang enticingly at the centre of the trellis on the inside, and I do, I have to teeter on the wooden frame of the raised bed, stretch over two or three feet, steady myself with one hand along the trellis frame, and then try to pick each of those peas -- which are clearly the very best of the lot -- with only one hand. A weird new yoga pose. Although you really do need two hands to pick snap peas. So it's far better if you can do it while standing well-balanced on the earth on your two feet. I'd be standing on chard if I tried that. It's what you could call a design flaw.

This western side of the island has such high winds that the trellises blew over during the garden's first summer. We lost the last of the peas that year. After that Greg sank the posts into concrete to keep them upright through the whole season. So where they are is where they will be: what you could call a permanent design flaw.

I'm bringing all sorts of things into the house these days besides the peas: huge baskets of collards and turnip greens, chard, kale, curly lime-coloured mustard, great piles of lettuce. I can vaguely remember all the work that went into this year's garden -- the raised beds, the winter seaweed, the spring digging, the compost. But the pea trellis is not the only design flaw. Some of the raised beds are too wide. It's a big stretch to reach into the middle to cut greens or pull weeds. My early miscalculations put me in awkward positions every day.

But there are essential elements that have nothing to do with either how hard I've worked or how many mistakes I've made: the balance of sun and rain, the pace at which summer has unfolded here on the island, the warmth of the season. Except for the watering, I have little power over any of that. So when I'm picking the peas or cutting the collards my basic position is amazed.

apples in July

Slowly we are beginning to know these old apple trees. I could only get so far with actually identifying most of them, but from year to year we learn their patterns and remember some of their characteristics. Slowly they are coming into focus as particular trees.

And already we can begin to see which are likely to do well this fall. The Alexander, for example, which makes a golden cider that takes like honey. It did beautifully the first year we harvested, then produced miserably last year. This year it looks loaded with fruit. Maybe it's an every-other-year tree, or maybe last year it was recovering from being pruned.
The anonymous tree nearest the garden gate looks as if it, too, will bear well this year. It seems to do well every year. Its apples are tiny, and much appreciated by all manner of creature. Last year there weren't many left by the time Greg picked them, but only because so many had already dropped, a feast for the sheep and deer.
The Gravenstein seems to have more apples than last year too. I think it's biennial, though.
Also the Maiden's Blush, a tree the sheep particularly adore. The Greening up along the short-cut is doing well, whereas last year it had nothing to speak of.

It could just be that last year was just a pretty poor year for all growing things. There were also no wild raspberries, for instance. And we only got half as many walnuts as we did the year before. Last summer was cool and wet and nothing ever really seemed to take off.

So far, this season promises to be much better.

the elementary life

When the children were little they had a small boxed set of Laurent de Brunhoff's Babar books. The set was called something like The Elements. Each of the four tiny books was devoted to the discovery of an Aristotelian element -- earth, fire, water, air -- through the explorations and experiences of the elephants and their friends. In Babar's world the elements were as fanciful and enchanting as the king's own green suit. But out amongst the grown-ups the elements were abstract concepts: not really there. We had more important things to think about. I sometimes remember the sense of intricate wonder contained in those little books as I am slowly introduced to the elementary life.

Now that the daily provision of heat is not an issue, we have turned to the production and storing up of food. Most of next winter's wood pile is split and stacked, Greg's work of March and April. Since early May I've spent most of my time working in the garden or the greenhouse, getting ready for the brief growing season that is almost upon us. I think mostly in terms of growing what we can freeze for the winter. Meanwhile, Greg has become adept at pre-dawn visits to the gill net and at gutting the fish he finds there. He's at work on a small chicken coop in hopes that we can begin to have a few chickens after all. He is brewing more beer. All of this is absorbing and complex, time-consuming and labour-intensive. It's not so simple. But with each season, I think, we inch closer to the mysteries of the elements.

Time plays its part as well. I missed lots of what was really going on when I lived a speeded-up, multi-tasking, over-developed life. Because lots of what is really going on either changes in an instant, like a heron flying over, or takes eons, like the waves against the rock. My normal mode wasn't tuned into the extremes. Then there is the subtle unfolding and fullness and waning of each season, which I am only slowly beginning to recognize. I didn't realize that I was missing so much, though -- how could I know what I wasn't aware of? I just thought that life was somehow narrower than I wanted it to be, and I didn't want it to end like that, narrowing and narrowing.

I've been worried about our snake population, but as the weather has warmed up I've started seeing more of them. One or two are in the vegetable garden when I go up in the mornings. And yesterday a tiny twitch of a bright green fern bank revealed the hidden presence of a toad slowly making his way away from me. The snakes and toads are themselves fanciful, out of a children's story, and might even wear suits on occasion, though I have not yet observed it, and possibly the occasion does not often arise. Snakes and toads are mysteries too, enchanting, earthily elemental, present yet elusive. Happy the person who is fortunate enough -- and slow enough --to notice them.

in the greenhouse

Last summer Greg built a greenhouse. Then it sat there, waiting for the time to be right. I whitewashed the glass with a mixture of water and hydrated lime, which we have already because hydrated lime is also something you need in the outhouse. (Well, yes, we do still have an outhouse.) Hydrated lime is now on my list of very useful things I never knew anything about until we came to the island. Also whitewashing.
This spring Greg made a bunch of trays out of leftover wood. The bottoms are made out of leftover sheet metal, so they sort of retain moisture. I began by putting the trays on the lower shelves, then after the seeds sprouted I moved them to the upper shelves.
Here's what I hope: the greenhouse will give these babies a head start in their upcoming wrestling match with hungry insects. The bugs will be so daunted when they finally come face to face with all this enormous size and powerful greenness that they will just throw up their hands and slink away in abject surrender. Victory for chard! Anyway, that's what I hope.

caught in the net

Skipper set out the gillnet in the cove on Victoria Day. I was supposed to meet him at his place that morning so I could learn how to set the net and take it up again. Since whoever is monitoring it needs to take it up every so often and lay it out on the shore to dry. I missed my lesson, though, and he fired me right then and there. Luckily for me, I am the only worker actually available on the island, so he had to rehire me immediately, and at twice my original pay.

Yesterday morning the net held five fish of some variety we couldn't identify. We had two for supper last night. They were bony but delicious. But maybe that was beginner's luck, because when I went back out in the afternoon there were none.

Today was a quite different story. The remains of several fish lay caught in the net. The seal had had his breakfast. He is a sloppy eater, biting off whatever is nearest him and leaving the rest. I worked my way down the net, releasing half-eaten leftovers. One little fish was quite alive and slipped away happily. As I went along I cleaned out rockweed and kelp that had drifted into the net.

I came upon three small lobsters. The first two were small enough that they were easy to hold in one hand while with the other I slowly disentangled the net from their claws and carapace, admiring them the whole time, and also staying clear of their furiously waving pincers. I told them not to swim into the net again, and slipped them back into the water.

The third lobster was a bit larger. It was easy enough to ease the net around and off his legs and tail and body. But his pincer claw grasped several strands of net like there was no tomorrow. I explained to him that I couldn't release him until he had let go of the net. But he was not listening. Maybe he was too anxious. Maybe holding onto the net was giving him some sense of security. And here I was, someone he didn't even know all that well, trying to convince him to let go. It seemed obvious to me that he was creating his own problem here. But then I suspect I do the same thing myself once in a while.

Finally I remembered that if you tapped his upper claw a bit he would open the pincers. And that's what he did. At which point he briefly experienced the amazement of flight before returning rather abruptly to his safe haven beneath the water. All in all, it was a memorable day for three little lobsters.

After that, fishless, I rowed all the way to the Horseshoe and back, on smooth water sometimes crosshatched and stippled, sometimes swelling softly beneath the boat. The island's stillness was broken only by the songs of white throated sparrows in the forest and terns fluttering over the water. In the distance I could hear the muffled, hollow metallic sounds of work being done on the shipyard in Shelburne. Occasionally a lobster boat steamed homeward. Fog hugged both the northern and southern ends of the island. The cove waters were pearl and silver, beneath a drifting sky of changeable grey and a hint of sunlight.

Planting lazy potato beds

It's my second year for planting lazy potato beds.Greg picked up five varieties of seed potatoes at Uncle Sid's, which is near Shelburne.
He got Eramosa, Superior, Yukon Gold, Kennebec, and Red Pontiac.

After they sprouted I cut them up and planted them in the fish bait boxes, which are called fish pans by the people who really use them for their intended purpose, which would be --fish bait.

The potatoes are planted in a little dirt and a lot of seaweed. I think I am only beginning to appreciate the many uses of seaweed.

Strawberry wisdom

For years, before we came to this blessed place, I ate something that looked like a strawberry but actually had no taste at all. After a while it became something I wouldn't even bother to buy, even though, of course, it was available in the grocery store all year around. But once in a while it showed up on your dessert plate in a restaurant, a pretty garnish.

The first summer we arrived in Nova Scotia we began seeing hand-written signs outside Spencer's, the local garden centre, announcing that Lore's strawberries had arrived. What's the big deal with Lore's strawberries, I said to myself. But we bought a pint and took them home.

I remember my first bite of that first strawberry. It evoked in me a curious combination of emotions: speechless joy, but also anger that I had been so badly fooled for so many years, and sadness for all I'd missed. A strawberry is not something to be casually plunked onto the side of a plate, for colour. A strawberry is -- oh, let's just say it -- a sign of heaven. And a hard dry thing having only the appearance of a strawberry is a travesty and a mockery and does not deserve the name.

The Nova Scotia strawberry season lasts only a few weeks, depending on the weather. It is to be patiently and eagerly awaited, and entered into with awe. You must empty out everything that keeps you from joy: your anxiety, your cynicism, your lack of forgiveness, your sense of entitlement. Make room, instead, for the fullness of gratitude. Taste and see. When you eat a strawberry, do not speak. The moment is too precious for that.

And then, because you cannot keep it (except for freezing, but that's not the same), the season ends, and only its memories remain.

Last fall Joanne McFadden, the pastor at Trinity United Church in Shelburne, offered me strawberry plants from her parsonage garden when the time was right. Then, the other day, the time was right. I dug the new raised bed Greg built for this exact purpose last fall, and added plenty of magical island compost.

Joanne gave the strawberry plants to Greg. They sailed across the sea to their new island home.

In only a few years, there will be strawberries on McNutt's Island. In the meantime, I'll watch for that handwritten sign at Spencer's, a simple word to the wise: Lore's strawberries are here.

Lore's Strawberry Farm is located at 5505 Upper Clyde Road, in Middle Clyde. The phone number there is 902-875-2102. You can pick your own strawberries at Lore's, or just get them at Spencer's.

Eating locally

I love the idea of the hundred mile diet but sometimes I think we are aiming for something a bit more local -- the (mostly) three mile diet, maybe. Or the (maybe) three mile diet, mostly. But with bananas and chocolate and coffee from somewhere far far away -- farther even than Ontario. We aren't very rigorous about it. Instead of setting rules for ourselves, we have just tried to discover the edible opportunities in our new situation. And so, gradually, over the last three years, everything changed for us.

And for dinner the other night: our first-ever asparagus! Yes, it was a tiny amount, but so pretty and good. This is the only harvest we'll allow ourselves this season. It's supposed to keep growing its root system so that in a couple more years it will be a strong perennial crop and we'll be able to harvest asparagus for several weeks. And to go with our teeny tiny asparagus helpings -- lobster from right here in the the cove, thanks to Dylan and Dylan's dad.

We are coming to the end of all the food we put away in the freezer last fall: island lamb and mutton and mutton sausage; mackerel from the cove; cranberry sauce and chanterelles from island foraging; and from the garden, grape leaves, beans, chard, snap peas, beets, cabbage soup, squash soup, zucchini soup, and pesto of all sorts -- marjoram, sage, parsley, and carrot top. Even with our garden losses last fall, we did pretty well with vegetables thanks to Mary and Leroy's gifts. We still have fresh apple cider in the freezer and hard cider in bottles in the cellar. The home-made beer is -- alas -- all gone.

It was amazing to realize how much of what we ate this year was food we had grown, caught, found, bartered for or been given. And just how close to home most of it was. It has been easier than I ever would have thought to shed the habitual behaviours of a life time and do it all differently.

I planted peas and lettuce last Saturday and with luck we'll be eating a bit of home grown salad by the end of June. In the meantime, the Shelburne Farmers' Market begins its second year soon. That's pretty local, too.

Greens from the greenhouse

I didn't think we could grow anything in our unheated greenhouse this winter. But just to see what would happen, I planted a few seeds in late September: some chard, and mustard, and mesclun. I kept them watered when I remembered.
Now, it's nothing to brag about if some seeds you planted turn into teeny tiny greens after nearly three months. But, anyway, they did. Even though lately we have have very cold days and nights, with lots of icy wind -- the kind that cuts through anything. So my conclusion is that this little greenhouse will stand up to a lot more bad weather than I had thought.

Beginning tomorrow we will be away for a while. So I went ahead and harvested our baby greens. A whole small bowlful for our supper tonight.

Winter garden

We were lucky to have a few extra weeks of nice weather in November and early December to finish up work in the vegetable garden. Greg attached the orange flounder net over the teal herring net all the way around the garden. So now we have two layers of resistance -- the ultimate deer fence.

Greg made raised beds for the whole garden, too. I brought up seaweed from the shoreline and put about three inches of it into each raised bed.
Some beds have mostly eelgrass, others mostly rockweed.
So now the garden is ready for its winter sleep.