A rescue mission

 

Within a week gentle autumn packed its bags and opened the door to its alter ego, showing its stern ‘no more of this mellow fruitfulness’ face.

Oh, I heard it coming: more geese pushing southward, harsher winds driving ragged clouds across the sky, rustling ever-fading leaves, their slow drifting down changed to a madly whirling dervish dance. I pushed aside the skin of ice on the rain barrel some mornings, wore a jacket when I had been working in the garden in shirt sleeves a few days before. I saw the forecast changed to temperatures that suddenly made it urgent to finish the harvest. No more leisurely picking and pulling here and there: this required a concerted effort.

 

Not much was left: some potatoes, cabbages and onions, the carrots and leeks, the few tiny Brussel sprouts that had formed on heavily leafed stems, witness to this strange season. One more cutting of Swiss chard, its ruby stems glowing as much as the golden blossom of the stray calendula beside it, one more of lettuce, such a gift so late in the season. The last apple tree, still reluctant to let go of its load of crimson apples, needed to be picked clean as well if I wanted to salvage the crop before the heavier frosts.

 

Once I had dug the leeks I had the perfect bed to seed some lettuce and spinach, getting a head start next spring, and there was even room for some garlic, plump cloves from this year’s crop harvested in early September. It's amazing how much one can accomplish in a single day if necessary...

Now only one important job remained: the five goldfish, who had spent the summer in the pond in front of the house, needed to be brought inside to the fish tank in the basement, their wintering place. I had cleaned it earlier that day, made sure the pump was working, and all it needed was water which Johann was going to bring in from the rain barrels, the five gallon pails too heavy for me to carry all the way down to the basement. 

Since the fish can be quite elusive and skittish after spending the summer 'in the wild' where they feed on mosquito larvae and other tasty morsels Mother Nature provides, the process of catching them in the fall is not simply a matter of going out there and scooping them up with a net. It involves a bit of planning, a submersion pump and two people, one to hold the pump while draining the small pond, the other perched on the rocks of the rock garden surrounding the pond with the net, eyes peeled for any sign of a moving red target. With the sudden arrival of almost-winter temperatures hadn't climbed above the freezing mark all day, and the cold wind made it very unpleasant. I smashed the thin layer of ice on the pond every few hours, though there was no danger of the fish being being cast in ice yet.   

 By the time Johann came in from taking care of some final field work it was nearly dark--not the right conditions for catching wily goldfish. The undertaking had to be postponed till the next morning. The fish would survive one more night out there. 

I awoke to the wind whistling around the house and temperatures of -10 the next day. High time to transfer those poor little fishes to their winter quarters! Johann had dumped several five gallon pails of water into the aquarium the night before and added a couple more in the morning. Looking for his winter boots in the basement before our mission he suddenly heard a cracking noise, followed by the sound of water running: there had been too much pressure on the aquarium wall and it cracked. I, already dressed in snow suit, toque and mitts, dropped net and pail and rushed downstairs when I heard him exclaim. As quickly as we could we bailed out the rest of the water and filled several of the pails, mopped up the water that had slowly started to spread through that part of the basement and were finally ready to brave the elements. 

An icy blast of wind almost took my breath away when I rounded the corner of the house. This would not be a pleasant task! The ice on the pond had grown to more than an inch of thickness overnight, and it was quite a job to hack through it by now; yet most of it needed to be removed if we wanted to have any hope of catching the fish. I could see three of them through the ice and was able to catch two in the net and drop them in the pail with water that was waiting by the side of the pond, but of course the whacking and movement spooked the other one, and it quickly went into hiding under the rocks again where, I assumed, the last two had already sought shelter. Pulling out the chunks of ice with mittens was awkward, and I soon  discarded them. My hands were so cold I could hardly feel them. Water dripped from the pieces of ice onto the round shoulders of the rocks when we threw chunks of ice on the lawn, making them slippery and hazardous to walk on. 

By now enough water had been pumped out that I could stand in the pond, but the constant disturbing of the water had muddied it, which made it even more difficult to spot the fish. Finally luck was with us again and I netted two more. There was only a small depression of mucky water left now, the pump starting to suck air, yet the last fish remained elusive. Had I not known that it had to be there I would have been tempted to give up. Poor fish! So much stress after summer's life in the wild ... Finally, a glimpse of something red thrashing wildly! Quickly I scooped it up and reunited it with its companions in the five gallon pail in the basement, their temporary home until the aquarium is repaired or we find some other suitable container.

Relieved, face and hands still red and burning from the cold wind and water, I watched them, calm now, fins moving lazily. The abundant insect diet of the summer must have agreed with them: they had definitely grown. A couple of water beetles had found their way into the pails as well. I hope they will all get along there as they did in the pond.

That day's words in my little calendar of Eastern wisdom? 

"One is not called noble who harms living beings. By not harming living beings one is called noble." 

                        --Buddha

Had I harmed these living beings? Looking at them now, a couple of days later, I'd say I didn't--but what do I really know about harming goldfish? That's a totally different topic, however.  

Has winter really arrived already?

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

 

Autumn is maybe the season most asking for poetry, and during my joyful harvest work in the garden one or the other wonderful poem, especially by the German romantic poets, suddenly slips into my mind at this season. This is one of my English favourites from that era, so rich in images:

 

                Ode to Autumn  

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees;

Until they think warm days will never cease;

For summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.

 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a grainary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,

Droused with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press with patient look

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

 

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music, too,--

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river-sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn,

Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

                                                --John Keats

 

 

After the miserable, wet, mostly cool summer September surprised us with an unexpected gift: sunshine and warmth, mostly dry weather to bring in the harvest, and an outpouring of all the colours and scents the season at its best has to offer. It was as if we were to forget all the mud, drowned crops in field and garden, washed out roads and other miseries of the previous months, plus the difficult harvest conditions of the last few falls. Now, the end is in sight, only one field of canola remains standing, and with luck that, too, will be gone in a week or two; so far it still is not ripe enough to be cut. 

Photo courtesy of Courtney von Rennenkampff

Yes, on top of all the other good-weather news comes the fact that we still didn’t have a hard frost. A few mornings the grass and car windows were lightly frosted over, but the thermometer hardly dipped below the freezing mark. Whenever it threatened to do so I covered cucumbers and beans—not that they had much to lose--, zucchini and tomatoes, dahlias and all the flower pots, and finally one evening about two weeks ago when the frost warning from Environment Canada sounded a bit more serious, we picked all the tomatoes. They are now ripening in boxes under the bed in the spare bedroom, covered with newspapers. They could have remained on the vine, as it turned out later: the few tomatoes that had been hiding under leaves are still untouched by frost, and even new blossoms have appeared. I daresay they are overly optimistic, but it’s still nice to see. 

I’m still picking beans and strawberries, and the zucchini are not giving up yet either. Sweet peas add their bit to the tapestry with their purples, pinks, reds and whites, their deep fragrance calling me to stop and bend my head to the blossoms whenever I walk by. Yet the season is slowly taking its course: sunflowers are hanging heavy heads now, and not many are still blooming, so that bees and bumble bees convene in clusters on the remaining flowers while the chickadees and blue jays have started to fill their bellies from the ripened ones. 

As pitiful as some of the garden crops were, in particular potatoes and onions which suffered greatly during the summer from repeated submersion after yet another heavy rain, as abundant was the fruit harvest. Black currants were weighed down with clusters of berries the size of small grapes, and it’s a miracle that none of the branches broke off the apple trees. It’s fortunate that our three trees ripen at different times. The first and second have been picked clean for three weeks and ten days respectively, the apples from the third are still on the tree and will remain there until hard frost looms or they start falling; neither seems to threaten yet. Of course all these apples mean spending many hours processing them since especially the first batch won’t keep much longer than two or three more weeks. Apple sauce, apple butter, pie filling and several different kinds of cakes are filling freezer and shelves, and it is great to have a steady supply of apples to eat fresh no further away than the cold room in the basement. 

Huge flocks of cranes and snow geese moved over us for a couple of days about two weeks ago, and every evening Canada geese make a big ruckus when they return to their resting places after a day of gorging themselves on the stubble fields, preferably, I think, on peas. They will stick around for a while longer, as will ducks and hawks. Juncos, little transients we see only in spring and fall, flash their white tail feathers darting out of the drying perennials or between raspberry bushes. 

I know all this glory cannot last forever, though every autumn again I wish it did. All I can do, then, is to spend as much time as possible in the garden and among the trees, to appreciate it all, from the bejewelled spider web on a misty morning to the red harvest moon rising in the east these last few days, the constellations of summer making room for those of fall and winter, Orion and Taurus taking their designated spots.