Beauty

  Winter has more or less arrived, though we have just had a couple warmish days with moody rain clouds sharing the sky with patches of sunshine. Our Fall fruit trees are winding down. We are still getting a few feijoa, but nothing like the absolute piles of them we had at the height of the season. Both me and my son love them, but this year we got overwhelmed and I started scooping out the insides and freezing them by the cup for baking later. I'm sure the pruning I did last Winter helped, and I am determined to finally start a programme of weeding, mulching, and feeding them this year. 

  A couple of weeks ago I went out and picked all of our crab apples. We got 16 in total, all of them spotty but tasty. It was a vast improvement over the total of two we got last year, so I know the pruning and compost helped. It's an ancient knobbly old tree, so I didn't expect much.

 One day at the very end of Fall I went out to the garden with my son and we picked carrots and the last bright red capsicum to eat with our lunch. We took a look at the crabapples too and he picked the first one and ate it before we even got back inside. It's wonderful to have a reason to go out in the garden this time of year. I love it when I can get my son out there too, engaging with food and where it comes from. I feel I'm doing okay if I've got at least a little something I'm still harvesting over Winter.

 Some of the Winter veggies I got in rather late, and they are still growing - and doing it slowly now as we near the shortest day of the year. But my carrots and peas I got in earlier in the Fall and they are the best looking things in the garden right now. The carrots are ready to harvest any day now. The peas are a meter high and have just started to flower. I forgot that when I picked them out of the catalogue I had selected the variety not only for practical reasons, but also for beauty.

  I really can't get over how beautiful these two-toned purple flowers are on their long, graceful stalks. What a joy to watch these flowers unfold here at the start of Winter. It's one of the things I love about heirloom vegetables. Past generations created these varieties for backyard gardens. They carefully selected for favourable traits - taste, disease resistance, heartiness in their particular climate. This was a serious endeavour that had to do with sustainence, resilience, survival even. And yet they also selected for beauty. They lived with these plants, saw them every day, carefully raised and harvested, washed and cooked them. They chose traits that would nourish their souls as well as their bodies. It's not something I've been told or have read in any book. It's just so clear sometimes when I look at these old varieties. I can see how much people loved these plants, took pride in their cultivation. There's something really beautiful about that.

The tiny crabapple harvest

Carrots, the last capsicum, and the crabapple core

Broccoli seedling making do with the thin Winter sunshine. Rainbow silverbeet behind it.

Peas flowering, and the frilly carrot fronds off in the right corner