The News from Kenabeek

The season is progressing nicely. We didn’t get the poplars and birches turning at the same time as the maples, but the maples made up for it by turning every colour from yellow through peach, various oranges, and red. We’ve had several cool and rainy days, and the maple leaves are beginning to fall, so the height of their colour is past. At their most intense (which I can actually pinpoint to a specific day last week), they were so bright it looked sunny even while it rained.

The poplars and birches are beginning to turn yellow, some more than others – some are still almost entirely green. The effect from a distance, in some places, is to recapture the light, golden green of early spring. I think they are waiting for an actual frost to really get underway – none here yet this year. The spruce and fir still retain the softer, brighter green of summer, and many of the spruce are so heavily laden with cones that the whole top of the tree looks more brown than green!

The other evening we were startled to smell smoke, quite strongly. It was dark, and we couldn’t see any flame, but it’s a somewhat alarming smell when you live surrounded by forest (which extends for miles south of us), and are protected only by a small volunteer fire department. It passed, although the next day you could still smell in faintly in places. Apparently it was smoke from a huge forest fire near Thunder Bay – a good day’s drive away – the news reported the next day that the smoke had reached into the Atlantic provinces.

Closer to home was a fire we didn’t smell. A neighbour was just starting to harvest his wheat, and asked a friend to drive back to the house to get him a drink. When she drove onto the field on her return, the heat of the truck’s undercarriage ignited the wheat! It caught quickly, spread like, well, wildfire, and burned with an extremely intense heat. The volunteer fire department came, and they got it out with no one hurt before it could spread to an buildings. So it could have been worse … but our neighbour lost 12 acres of wheat, and his truck. This is after his telling us he wasn’t sure he’d even bother to harvest his barley, because prices are currently so low no one is buying it. Farming. Even when you have good weather there’s something – the big factory farms are putting the little guys out of business even without disasters like that.

Most of the fields are harvested now, except for the corn, which still stands, brown from earth to top. And most of the wildflowers are gone, although there are still a few orange hawkweed (second bloom), and the tiny pale purple-white eyebright still spangles the grass here and there. In the garden, there are still some cosmos, poppies, and brown-eyed susans (although most of those are well past their prime). My honeysuckle continues to bloom, as it has all summer long, as does the nicotiana a friend gave me this year.

My sunroom / greenhouse is a mild success – we’ve had probably half a dozen small tomatoes, and several green peppers as well. Both peppers and tomatoes continue to blossom, so presumably will continue to bear fruit for a while yet.

The yield of fruit, though, is nothing compared to the plants themselves! This may be because I used straight black earth (extremely rich, for adding to your garden soil) in the pots – or maybe I chose the wrong varieties. At any rate, the plants are enormous – even the pepper plants are a good four feet tall, and the tomatoes must be six or eight feet, or even more – you can’t tell anymore, they are so big they’ve touched the skylights, curved back down, and reached the pots again! So a great deal of their energy went into building plants instead of fruit. I will do some actual research this winter before I start new plants! It’s been fun, the tomatoes were small but delicious, and it’s still a nice room to sit in, although the view is quite restricted by the tomato jungle!

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