After a few really warm days...

* First bamboo shoots seen today. The old bamboo canes are apparently all dead after the last super-cold winter, but we'll have new ones...
* Volunteer tomato seedling sprout in the beds where tomatoes were grown last year. (We treat them as useless, since we'll have much bigger tomato seedlings grown indoor. In Indiana, you can let volunteer tomato seedling grow into a real plant, and it usually will bring fruit, but it will do so a month or two later than transplanted seedlings)
* New mint stems and leaves appeared above the ground. I was wondering if mint had been fully killed by the cold winter, but no, it has not.

Asparagus

The first shoots of asparagus emerged above the ground a couple days ago. It's a been a long, cold winter, and a later spring...

Is the voice of the (snapping) turtle heard in our land yet?

If it is, the spring must be hear. When planting tender plants, gardeners rely on the "average last frost" dates in their calendars, but an unexpectedly late frost, often ruinous, is always possible. Wise farmers have various rule of the thumbs to figure when one should plant in a particular year. None of them, however, sounds better to me than this piece of advice shared by Susan Weisand, who grows hot chili peppers in southern Indiana, in a recent issue of the 812 Magazine:

Animals know the land better than you do.
I don’t plant until I see that my snapping turtle has laid her eggs in the spring. If she’s not out, I’m not planting.

(Photo of the snapping turtle by Willy Logan)

Now, where do I get a snapping turtle?

First frost, again

Sweet potatoes: in the ground... This year, the spring in southern Indiana was very early, with shirtsleeves weather by mid-March. The first frost also came a bit earlier (around Oct 9) than the last year. Just a light patchy frost, completely killing only the "subtropical" type plants, such as the silk melon (AKA loofah 丝瓜), bitter melon (苦瓜), winter melon (冬瓜), the vines of sweet potatoes (山芋). This of course is a signal to harvest your
... and out.

Dermenino

Dermenino, pop. 0

How do you get to Dermenino? Much of the year, you don't. In winter, the road is often blocked by snow; in the spring and fall, it's too muddy to get through. But this August, it was an easy trip.

The twice-a-day bus from Poshekhonye
The logging road enters the forest

To get to Dermenino (Дерменино), a village in the forests of north-central Russia, about half way between Rybinsk and Vologda, one needs first to get to Poshekhonye, the district capital, and the nearest town (pop. 6,000; distance from the closest train station, about 70 km; riverboat service, cancelled). From there, twice a day, local buses run another 60 km or so to the north to Andryushino. You get off at Vasilyevskoye (about 10 km before Andryushino), which is as far north as the paved road (such as there is) gets in these parts, and then you look for the track that leads farther north - to Dermenino, Menkovo, and Krasny Yar.

Whortleberry shrubs (черника), European dwarf cousins of American blueberry bushes

The track - which seems to begin in the backyard of a disused farm building - is a pretty straight dirt road. The dirt in "dirt road" may be understood quite literally a good part of the year, but this summer was quite dry, and the 5-km walk to Dermenino (you can also drive, if you have a suitable vehicle) was actually pretty good, although boring. There is, however, a more interesting way to get there: you can take a logging road to the northwest, and then hike east across the forest, fording the little river called Kisoma Volnaya (Кисома Вольная). For somebody who's used to hiking in more populated areas, the most remarkable thing here is that, once you're away from the woodlot, there are no visible traces of human presence: no trails, no cans or bottles or other trash, no cut trees... (Very different from, say North Vancouver's Grouse Mountain, where you can find anything, including an engine from a crashed American plane!).

Forest clearings made impassable by raspberry brambles. I happened to be there right at the peak fruiting time

The forest clearings, wherever they can be found, are almost completely occupied by dense raspberry brambles. I had been rather proud of a recent backyard garden project, where over three summer seasons I have expanded raspberry plantings from a two-meter-long row to perhaps the total of 20 meters, which allowed one to harvest maybe a pint or two of berries every day for three weeks. And here I am trying to make my way through something that looks like acres of raspberries, now (early August) all densely covered with ripe fruit. (With hardly a few hundreds of residents within 10-km distance - and probably zero within 3 km - it is no surprise that most raspberry patches never see a human picking the berries. I wonder if there are bears here, and what they are doing - but with this amount of berries, they are probably in a good mood. In some clearings there are also blueberries (more precisely, "whortleberries": fairly similar fruit, but with more intense taste, and growing on much smaller shrubs). There are also some lingonberries - the fruit that I had previously only seen in Lapland - but they are still green, as they should be. (The lingonberry season is usually a month or more later than the one for whortleberries).

The sign tells me where I am, but unfortunately I don't know how to read it. This is what the local lumberjacks must have used to orient themselves before the GPS.

As I am walking to the east, out of the deep forest and toward the Kisoma River and the "main" dirt road, I know that I am approaching the area that's at least theoretically populated, and expect to find some traces of the present (or former) residents' agricultural activities. The residents, however, are apparently long gone. There are clearing that must have been used for grazing, or for growing hay at some point - but by now they have shrubs and small trees growing on them. Obviously, noone has grazed cattle or cut hay here for at least a few years.

A better-preserved house in Dermenino...
...And one not so well preserved
Nice woodwork.

Once I reached the village itself, I expected to see some abandoned houses and some populated once, but, judging from the pattern of vegetation (as in, waist-high or chest-high weeds with not even a trail anywhere among them), it seemed that noone lives here anymore. I hope, of course, that I am wrong on this...

There are no actual trees growing on the streets and in the houses yet - just weeds, so far - which means that the last residents have left fairly recently.

The place even used to have street lamps at some point...
... but now wires are all gone

According to a posting on sobory.ru, Dermenino must have been a fairly important village for over a century, as it had its own church. According to that article, Dermenino's Church of the Epiphany, with additional altars in honor of the Nativity of Our Lady and of St. Philip Metropolitan of Moscow, was built ca. 1812-1814, and converted to the village school in 1934. The poster there, Maxim Leonidovich, actually has a photo of the building, but I did not happen to see it.

Some of the perennial flowers keep blooming among the weeds in front of houses whose residents are long gone
Empty bottles from a "bath elixir" in an abandoned house. Although the house most likely did not have a bathtub even in its better days, the residents must have found some creative way to use the product. According to labels on the empty 250 ml bottles, it is 88% alcohol, the rest being water and various herbal extracts.
A twig of a black currant bush, with absolutely delicious fruit, which tries to grow through the doorway (the door itself is gone) and into an abandoned house

The area is quite lovely, and although the latitude is 59 degrees north, they obviously have a decent growing season here. You sort of imagine how a few farming families could live here, keeping a herd of cows, making cheese, picking chanterelles in the forest, and filling the cellar with currant and raspberry jam for the winter. But I guess it just did not work out for anyone, what with the nearest paved road 5 km away, and, probably lots of other lots available for the taking, with similar conditions, but closer to civilization. Will people come back? Ten years from now? A hundred? Who knows...

This may have been one of the last letters received by anyone in Dermenino. As the address indicates, the village was served out of the post office in the nearby Menkovo, which is now closed.

The first frost - now for real

The "official" reports showed the low of only -1 C last night (Oct 29/30) here in Bloomington, Indiana, but that was enough to put the end to the growing season for the warm-weather crops. Tomato plants are dead all over town. Morning glory and basil mostly did not survive this either.

About time, I guess...

Some of our pepper plants, surprisingly, are still more or less alive. Perhaps, planting them on a slope helped a bit; also, the plants were somewhat sheltered from above by bean vines on the fence.

Now - as it so often the case - the forecast is for a few much warmer days. But that will only be of interest to cabbages, radishes and such.

The first frost (almost)

Time to harvest me!

The clear night of Oct 21/22 saw the first, very light, frost in parts of Bloomington, Indiana. Official data showed the low of -1 C (+30 F) that night, but obviously it varied between locations.

It was interesting to see its effect of such a "marginal" frost in the garden, as it provides an opportunity to see a fine difference between the sensitivity of different plants, or in the microclimate between different locations in the yard.

Even though peppers are generally said to be hardier than tomatoes, our sweet peppers and jalapeños were unscathed, but a few of the cherry tomato plants, growing near the lowest point of the garden were lightly "burned".

Too old for silk melon, to young for loofah...

The end has come for the two last melon/squash species in the garden. The winter melon (冬瓜) vines, on the ground, were killed, and so were most leaves of the silk melon (a.k.a loofah; 丝瓜) climbing on the fence and trees. The remaining fruit of both were, though intact. (The winter melon probably will be quite useful, but the silk melons appear to be at that awkward stage when they are too hard to eat, but have not yet dried to be conveniently made into loofah for the shower use). The vines of all other melons/squash plants we had had died many weeks ago, in August-Septmeber, God knows why - maybe it was too dry, maybe it was just their natural life cycle.

We had a couple cucumber plants planted in August as an experiment, trying to see if it is possible to obtain a second crop of cucumbers. That did not really work out: the plants struggled during the hot August, and now died with the first frost, producing all of half a cucumber between them.

A few of the morning glory leaves were burned by this mini-frost too, but, interestingly, they were mostly the leaves on top of the fence where the morning glory lives. So the effect in that area must have been not so much from the cold air, but from radiative cooling.

The okra, even though always considered a warm-climate plant, looks more or less alright - although it's pretty useless during the cooler part of the fall, producing hardly any pods anymore. (Not like in the summer, when a pod needs to be picked within a few days after blooming, lest it becomes too tough).

Beans are doing pretty well, so far...

Everything else still looks fine - even most of peppers, tomatoes and beans (growing on a slope, as well as most peppers; this may have helped them a bit; of course, their days are counted now...), as well as the hardier leaf vegetables (various brassica species, radishes, lettuce etc, as well as various ornamentals).

Well, it's only days until the first real frost, probably...