Autumn Transitions

I’ve been thinking a lot about the progression of fall this year; I mean, I usually do, anyway, because it’s a dynamic season, intense and dramatic, manic-depressive. But with Teale’s Autumn across America fresh in my mind, I’m more thoughtful about it than usual.

Unlike in springtime, where there’s no clear-cut time when the growing season officially begins, in fall, the first hard frost and freeze slices a distinct boundary between animation and dormancy, juiciness and dryness—the vibrancy of “red autumn” and the dullness of “gray autumn.”

Here in Central Missouri, our average frost date is about the middle of October, which also happens to be our usual fall color peak. A hard freeze can zap the fall color pretty abruptly. Then, the abcission wind comes in late October or early November, often with rain and dreary skies, to knock the leaves off the trees and thus prepare the trees for snow and ice. (Remember the abcission wind? We talked about that last year!)

So much of autumn seems to be about preparation for the winter.

But although we had wind and rain this past week, we still haven’t had a freeze yet, or even a hard frost.

There are many pleasant things about this situation—for example, Sue and I were able to bring in our tropical plants at our leisure. We dug up the elephant ears and hibiscus a few weeks ago, and Sue brought in her bonsai that can’t survive the cold. The Fukien teas and what-all. Some years, we get caught by surprise; we put off bringing in the plants until the last minute, then suddenly they’re predicting a freeze, and we’re out there with our spades, sometimes in the dark or the rain. Which is not quite optimal!

And then there are the brugmansias, which have multiplied over the years like bunnies. Like hibiscus, they must be brought indoors during winter. We’ve found, however, they only really begin to bloom about the beginning of October, so they’re usually in full bloom when we tell them, like moms tell kids on summer evenings: Time to come in!

So we always have to trim back the bruggies so they are, say, not taller than ourselves, which usually means hacking off all the glorious, footlong flowers. And we cart them and their big pots indoors. Into the basement. It’s kind of sad.




This year, Sue couldn’t bear to chop all those blooming heads off, so she set them, pots and all, at an angle. We have sideways trees in our basement! They’re blooming right now, even as I type this on the third floor of our house, and I can smell them all the way up here.




And we swapped the screens for storm windows again. By the way, there were big numbers on the “cussometer” this year—but it’s long story I won’t go into. Here’s a picture from my parents’ collection of my Grandpa and Grandma dealing with the storm windows. It was the early sixties, and judging from their smiles, the storm windows fit better forty years ago!




I also, quite at my leisure, picked all my basil and made pesto the same day I picked it.

Another day, I picked all my cayenne peppers and dealt with them: The smallish green ones went into freezer zip bags—they will heat up my Indian curries this winter! The mature, red ones, I dried: Trimmed off the green calyx on top, sliced them once lengthwise, spread them on a huge cookie sheet, and let them enjoy the dry warmth of Grandma’s incredible oven, all night long. Next morning, I turned them into “dynamite dust.” Lookie!




I didn’t deseed them or remove the “membranes.” (Hey, want a more precise name for that pithy stuff? It’s the placenta, that middle part that the seeds grow on; and the part that connects it to the fruit wall is the septum).

Dynamite dust! It’s just whole, ground cayenne. None of that sissy stuff for me! Good for what ails ya!

With all these preparations, though, there was no rush; we just found time here and there to get it all accomplished.

And yes, it’s rather pleasant to still have flowers around—chrysanthemums, and all that autumn-purple ageratum that grows around this yard for free. My herb garden’s still going at it; just today, I picked a handful of red-veined sorrel and some mint to go in a little salad at lunch.

. . . So when will it freeze?

Elephant Ears: The Springtime Drill

I’ve told you the story of Grandma’s prizewinning elephant ear plants before—but I didn’t give you pictures yet.

Here’s a brief recap; if you want to read the whole story, click here.

I’m not sure how long Grandma had these elephant ear plants, or how many she started with, but they seem to do very well in this backyard, and with annual regimen of care she gave them, which I continue. (Read that previous post for specifics on the care.)

Since they’re tropical plants, each October we have to dig up their huge, loglike rhizomes and take them inside for the winter. Then in may, once we’re past the danger of frosts, we plant them back outside in the ground.




We’re a bit behind this year—in part because it’s been rather cool and prone to frost, as well as rainy. (Who wants to work in mud?) Not to mention my ankle problems.

Anyway, since we cut grass yesterday and did lots of other stuff, and with rain threatening this afternoon, this morning was our big chance to get them in the ground.




I was still sore from yesterday’s exertions. (Until it happens to you, you don’t really appreciate how a single ankle injury can cause darned near every other joint in your body to ache! Which reminds me, I need to get us another big thing of ibuprofen . . .)

I think we counted fourteen large/original elephant ears, plus about half a dozen younger ones, which had arisen in previous years either as buds or from seed.

Last year, we learned about the importance of sunshine on the growth of elephant ears. Usually, we put them where Grandma usually had them, in a flower bed under a big yew tree—a rather shady location. But since we have “overflow,” last May we decided to put one baby elephant ear in a sunny, blank spot near our privacy fence. (Where Persephone is, now.)

Seriously, when we set it out a year ago, this thing was no bigger than about 2 inches in diameter. By August, it looked like this.




That’s a six-foot-high privacy fence behind it! The diameter at the base is about seven inches, now—plus it has two babies sprouting off the sides!

Sunshine + moisture + fertilizer = phenomenal growth!



The largest leaf blades were about a yard long!

Needless to say, this year, we planted a few new babies in that area, plus the one that had been there last year. I suspect they will all be enormous come August.




They’re not much to look at now (we didn’t even water them, since the weather forecasters sound very confident that we’ll have serious rain today)—and we haven’t put down the usual nice big layer of mulch (we didn’t think we had time, since the skies were getting gray and turbulent—but now it’s sunny again . . . Well, if it doesn’t rain, we’ll water them tonight).

Some of the other very small elephant ears have gone into big containers—well, at least until we decide where we might plant them elsewhere.




There is (quite literally) huge potential in these rhizomes; it’s always fun to see which ones develop the biggest leaves, which put their energy into flowers and fruits, and which decide to reproduce by growing new plants off to the side.




Oh, and did I tell you I was sorting through some old papers of Grandma’s a few weeks ago, and I discovered the actual blue ribbon the elephant ears had won? Lookie!




There’s no year on the label, but given the vintage of the various other papers this was shuffled with, I’d say she won it between about 1995 and 1999. Again, for more on the blue ribbon story, look here. It’s pretty funny.




I guess you could say the annual drill of planting these huge “logs” in the ground and then digging them up again five months later is kind of nutty—but if you had bona fide prizewinning plants, wouldn’t you feel compelled to keep them going, too?

Tonight's the Night

. . . Of the first hard freeze--or so they say.

Of all the places in Central Missouri, our house and yard seem to be the least likely to experience predicted frost and freezes, because we're on a hill, and cold air doesn't settle in here like it does in the hollows. Plus we're in town and have lots of asphalt and concrete to warm the place up.

But do you really want to take chances where they're talking "freeze"? We have the blue-ribbon elephant ears to think about, and they might be older than I am. And then there are the hibiscus. And the big scheffleras, and the brugmansias, the philodendrons, aloes, orchids, begonias, dracaenas, and more.

God, we have too many plants. (Anyone want some? Free to a good home . . .)

Some years, we're smart about it, and we set aside a weekend, in early or middle October, to move the plants. That way, we're not out there the day right before the freeze-night, all in a rush.

One year, we didn't start digging up the elephant ears until after dark, when it was already starting to get quite cold, and the ground was wet. I'd already taken my lenses out and was wearing my hated glasses, which were steaming up and slipping down my face as I was sweating.

Wow, did that suck! It was definitely a "10" on the cussometer.

You would think we would have learned our lesson, right? I mean, for the love of God, please, let's get it done before we have to.

Well, today we "had to." And no, it was not convenient for us, not at all.

True, it wasn't raining (hooray!) or snowing (hooray!), and the ground wasn't soggy (hooray!)--but we both have head colds. Yep. We both started feeling crappy at about the same time yesterday afternoon, and we're still in that horrible "coming down with it" stage. All day today we've been sinking.

You know what it's like when you're just at the beginning of the cold. Stuffy, puffy, painful. That sense of "Oh, no." We've both had sinus headaches all day. I honestly feel like shit. But the show must go on, right? Save the plants!

Dad was our hero--I'm almost ashamed to admit it--he came over and did all the digging, and he helped us with the lifting, while we moved plants, carting them from the backyard to the garage, and scratched our heads and tried to figure out where everything was going to go. At least for tonight.

We seriously have too many plants.

Seriously: Want some?

So I was at it all day, pretty much--I took a "break" in midafternoon to buy cold remedies, orange juice, and tissues. It should have felt like a break, but instead it felt like a huge amount of work, even just to change temporarily out of my dirty gardening duds and into something presentable enough for K-Mart.

There is a good chance we'll wake up tomorrow and find absolutely no sign of frost or freeze--that has happened before--I'm not kidding about this yard having a relatively warm microclimate.

But as I explained in my previous post, I tend to err on the side of caution these days. Taking chances can lead to regret.

So by now it's all done--well, mostly. There are a few plants that we left outside--a little schefflera and a little philodendron that we're sick of moving in and out. Sorry, plants--nice knowin' ya.

And the "chatter" roses are blooming quite profusely now--I usually cut them so we can enjoy the clusters of flowers indoors, instead of them getting socked by the freeze. But eh: pretty as they are, I don't think I could smell them now, anyway.

Grandma’s Blue-Ribbon Elephant Ears

I don’t think we’ve officially passed the last frost date, but we planted the elephant ears today, anyway. There’s nothing near freezing in the forecast for the next week, so I think we’re free and clear.

We have about a dozen of these things—elephant ear plants, also known as taro (Colocasia esculenta)—that all came with the house. They were Grandma’s. Before we bought the house, I had some experience in planting these; Grandma would supervise, reminding us to mix plenty of those fluorescent blue sprinkles of Miracle Gro into the soil as we refilled the holes around the rhizomes. (Yes, I know that goes against the package directions. But we water them thoroughly right after planting, and for the last several decades the track record is good.)

The rhizomes, which have to be planted upright into reasonably deep holes, range in length from two to about three feet, and the biggest ones are about five inches in diameter. In other words, they are like logs.

Over the years, Grandma planted them in different places in the yard, but mostly she kept them in the flower bed under the yew tree, where we have them now. The soil is particularly black and rich there, smooth, easy to dig a dozen log-sized holes in.

Although . . . it was harder digging today on account of all the recent rain. I guess gardening can’t always be perfectly easy (gardeners: snort with laughter at that comment).

Our usual m.o. is to dig them up in the fall, cut off the leaf blades, and prop them up in large garbage cans in the basement for their winter dormancy. Last fall, we waited until the last possible moment—the first frost and the first hard freeze were supposed to come on the same evening—and there we were out in the dark, shoveling the elephant ears out of the ground. It would be awful if these big beauties all got frozen.

So now it’s half a year later and time for them to get pumping for the new season. They don’t look like much now—just some yellow spikes and a few assorted leaves veering off the tuber tops. But we’ll mulch and fertilize them; we’ll give them lots of water. By August and September, they’ll be budding and blooming, turgid and crowned by majestic huge shieldlike leaves.

“Blue Ribbon” Claim to Fame

I’m telling this story third-hand, so bear with me. If I’ve got something wrong, let me know so I can fix it (Dad). Years ago, one of my grandma’s cronies and fellow garden-club lady, Bonnie Mae Dunlap, dropped by. She told my grandma that she was heading up to Tipton for a flower show, and she asked if my grandma wanted to enter anything.

I guess Grandma was busy. I guess she wasn’t about to drop everything and whip up a quick ikebana or other flower arrangement. I guess she must have just “thought fast.” So she walked over to the elephant ears, snipped off one of those tremendous leaves, and sent it to Tipton with Bonnie Mae. (I’m trying to picture Bonnie Mae tooling up Highway 50 with a huge elephant ear leaf bobbing around in the backseat.)

The garden club ladies in Tipton probably had to devote an entire table to Grandma’s entry!

And then Bonnie Mae returned that evening with a blue ribbon for Grandma’s prizewinning elephant ears!

And that is why when we have guests, I can put my nose in the air and show off our “blue-ribbon elephant ears.” Because it’s completely true.