Port Potager

Last night temperatures here dropped into the low 20s overnight — and for many hours. That’s officially the end of the growing season, as you can see by the state of this butternut squash vine: It was quite a cold morning, and the frost stayed on everything well after the sun came up. It was quite pretty, too: We had already picked our tender fruits last week in response to an (unwarranted) frost warning, so all we had to do last night was put up a few last tunnels over some of our greens : We tossed an old army blanket over the beets and cut a last harvest of Swiss chard. I left the celery alone, and it doesn’t seem much worse for wear this morning — it’s pretty tough. Still, we should probably bring it in by tomorrow, since the cold looks to be getting worse before it will get better.  After a very warm fall, it looks like fall is here to stay.

Earlier this week we had a frost advisory. I didn’t think we’d actually have a frost — and I was right — but it’s still a good idea to bring in the last of the tender crops just in case. This meant bringing in several ripe eggplants, along with the remaining bell peppers, jalapeños, and anchos. We also ended up pulling out the last broccoli and cauliflower plants this week, since they are completely spent and have succumbed to aphids (ditto on our Brussels sprouts, which is total bummer — we didn’t get any). We also brought in what was left of our tomatoes, which are in varying stages of ripening. We may just wait for them to turn red, or we could make a green tomato pie . It seems a little silly to bake anything with 20 pounds of a trick-or-treat candy haul lying around, but you never know.  We also covered over our green for winter though those tunnels are open again now. It was actually quite warm for the rest of the week, and we had a pretty visitor: ...

When I was still teaching, I was faced with getting an obligatory master’s degree. All public school teachers in Massachusetts have to do this eventually to keep their licensure up to date, but it’s an awful lot of work to go back to school while still teaching school. And for an English teacher (which I was for eight years), it’s kind of a nightmare. No one works harder than a high school English teacher. It’s a never-ending cavalcade of shit in the form of a bottomless stack of (terrible) papers to grade. When you layer additional coursework and research papers on top of that, you might as well kiss your sanity goodbye. So I thought that choosing the Creative Writing concentration of an English M.A. would at least make it more fun and provide a layer of personal fulfillment to the mix. As long as I had to shell out thousands of dollars and hours for an advanced degree, I might as well enjoy it, right? So that’s what I did. It was still a shit-ton of work, but when it was over ...