Thistle moon garden

As November cools the summer garden, I’m embraced by foliage from our jungle of houseplants. Their green energy will make good company when I’m gazing on wintry landscapes. Plants adapt readily to their new window-ledge homes, flush with renewed vigor. We share lowered sunlight in shortened days and hope for next season’s adventures with seed and flora.

Warm temperatures are slipping and white rims of frost lace every leaf, late into our valley morning. It’s past midday when I’m putting in a few purple scilla bulbs, and transplanting a Blue Star juniper to a sunnier spot. As the garden rests and snow cloaks the ground, it’s natural to look forward, collecting and preserving seeds for next year.

A gorgeous assortment of striped, spotted and colored beans has grown this season, and I find a few more each day.

I’m adding soil amendments, like granulated rock phosphate and wood ash to develop new vegetable beds. I supplement borders with woodchips and infuse aged manure into growing areas. Fall leaves are spring-raked from our roof and blacktop and layered onto a heap.

Thanksgiving provides an opportunity to celebrate our garden harvest of pumpkins, beans, squash, kale and strawflowers. I can imagine a platter of steamed Banana squash with black Romano beans and red fingerling potatoes. We are still picking savory leaves of lettuce, parsley and chard from under recycled windows, tipped together to form a mini-greenhouse. Layers of plastic sheeting will protect greens into December.

I’m contemplating our second-year garden, while plant vitality is sequestered in perennial roots and embryonic seeds. As I look at the whole garden, I can see what is thriving, and what needs transplanting. I’ll move a young Full Moon maple and a Snowball viburnum to brighter locations, because the crown of a Galaxy magnolia shades them. On a rise between road-front and stonewall, I’ve planted three tree peonies, a purple beauty bush, a hydrangea, red and yellow daylilies and white-spotted lungworts. All are settling in nicely, nurtured with thick applications of mulch. The vegetable garden is productive despite some shade, even producing a couple of bull-nosed peppers. One went nearly unnoticed beneath a veil of greenery, until turning a gleaming orange-red and catching my eye.

The new compost pile overflows with residue of the widened garden and gathers nitrogen from spent comfrey stalks. I start a new one each year, and feed it often. I’m grateful for the simple rhythm of composting that accompanies gardening life. I’m known to take leftovers from holiday meals to sweeten the pile. I add kitchen cuttings each morning. I enjoy the breath of fresh air and being among the elements.

Pine siskins flutter and flock, eating seeds in our border of nodding stems—goldenrod, blackberry and aster. I am interested to learn that music, played to enhance plant growth, mimics bird song. Listen to violin passages from Vivaldi’s “Springtime.” Birds and plants coevolved over millennia; bird songs help open leaf parts for breathing and nutrient uptake. I find myself more pleased with my casual habit of tweeting back at a singing bird. It is affirming to recognize interdependence with the wild.

“Dull November brings the blast,

Then the leaves are whirling fast.”

—Sara Coleridge