The Edible Landscape: Winter Solstice

The first rains came softly and quietly. Everything was wet and shiny and green, and the air was washed clean.
It was spider time—they appeared everywhere, attached to every shrub and vine—and I constantly walked into invisible silk strands crossing the paths. If I walked through a doorway, detaching the edges of webs as I passed through and returned five minutes later, a new web would already be in place.
As the slanting rays of the sun crossed the rose garden, the tiny beads of moisture on each web lit up like crystals. The garden was ready for awards night, the spiders splayed in the center of their bejeweled creations and I wanted to ask them, “Who are you wearing?” Was this perhaps the first inspiration for strings of holiday lights?
I’m secretly a little pleased that the cool, wet season has arrived. The front yard is planted in chard and kale and garlic, and the urgency to water has finally passed. As sunset comes earlier and earlier each day, my focus has turned to the weaving studio, making warm things for winter, and—of course—to the kitchen.
In the quiet evenings surrounding winter solstice, I like to cuddle up on the couch in a warm blanket, eat soup and drink wine, watch the Food Channel and read. It is somewhat of a relief to view the garden from the kitchen window, and not feel the urgency to DO SOMETHING out there.
As for reading, I love books and magazines about gardening—reading what other gardeners write, and also biographies and philosophical writings—even novels in which gardens are central characters. The winter solstice is also my time to recall the past year and to formulate my own philosophies about gardening and how I live my life.
My garden does not adhere to the human concept of seasons—the garden’s seasons have more fluid boundaries, which becomes clear as I scroll through the past year in my mind. Nothing was ?as I expected it to be—a good reminder of one of The Four Agreements from the philosophy of Don Miguel Ruiz: Don’t make assumptions.
Here in Sebastopol, we traditionally have a rainy season, which begins anywhere from September to January, followed by spring, which begins anywhere from January to June. That’s followed by summer, which can start in April and end in May (or start in August and end in November), and then there’s the mythological post-Labor Day Indian Summer, lasting until the first cold grey day reappears. Or not.
One commonly held assumption is that we cultivate our gardens and that we, in that sense, control them. But author Michael Pollan, who wrote the very informative and entertaining book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has altered my view with his premise that corn is manipulating us.
I do attempt to cultivate my garden, but it’s getting pretty obvious that the garden is in charge of me. After all, I’m the one who gets out there and feeds it and makes its beds and cleans up after it. The garden does whatever it pleases. But what it does pleases me in return, and keeps me plodding along.
It’s that proverbial carrot on a stick (although I have never succeeded in getting the garden to produce an actual carrot), and I am extremely well fed by what the garden has chosen to give me this year: baskets full of apples, pears and tomatoes; gallons of blackberries and raspberries; huge bouquets of chard, kale, nasturtium and sunflowers; salads of lettuces, arugula and cucumbers; broccoli, onions, garlic and zucchini; beans and corn; mint, basil and cilantro; fragrant roses and lavender; passion flowers and rosemary with hundreds of bees sampling their blossoms.
No matter what the season or the weather, there is something to eat, to smell or delight my eyes out there. Butterflies and hummingbirds, tiny yellow finches and even the raucous blue jays are endlessly entertaining. At the far end of my backyard, where a row of sunflowers drooped their heavy, seed-filled heads, a squirrel scampered up the thick stalks, grasped a flower head in tiny paws, and leapt to a fence top to methodically munch the seeds as if they were an ear of corn.
Now it is quiet – the worms make no noise as they eat their way through the compost, the leaves from the fruit trees have fallen and are silently decomposing, and a pot of red vegetable soup is gently bubbling on my kitchen stove.