Greenhouse Music

Darkling beetle

etching his way

out of a glass jar;

he doesn't know

he is making music

Hard Frost

After a hard frost

the last of the tomato vines

freeze into brown bones. 

The frost and snow were late this year. We didn't have our first snow until Sunday; for the first time this season, Blanca is truly white. Our tomato plants have withered to skeletons in the greenhouse. The plants in our sunroom are still eking out a few orange tomatoes, their sweetness concentrated by the cold. We eat the small, candy-like segments on our salads. Their flavor is a ghost of summer.  

This is the time of year when everything shrinks into itself, hardening against the cold. The dirt roads have turned into rutted ribbons. The rabbitbrush and tumbleweeds are stiff hands, raised plaintively against the North wind. 

Greenhouse Tomatoes

Dipping and pouring

I water the tomatoes

with a warm glass jar.

Greenhouse

This is the greenhouse that Eric has been building. Its plastic "walls" have been delivered and are coming soon. The young herbs and vegetables have been growing in our sunroom, waiting for frost danger to pass. In the San Luis Valley, that doesn't happen until mid-June.

I have an apple tree seedling that I've been cultivating. I found the sprouted seed inside a Pink Lady apple.

Photo by Eric Havelock-Bailie