Dateline: New Paltz, NY, October 19^th, 5:30 am. I bet my garden is colder than your garden. I was startled this morning to see the thermometer reading 23 degrees F. Not much I could do at that point about protecting “cold weather” vegetables still in the garden, some covered with floating row covers and some in “plein aire.” The thing to do under these circumstances was wait for the sun to slowly warm everything up and then assess the damage.

I ventured out to the garden for a survey in the sunny midafternoon. Joy of joys. None of the cold-hardy vegetables was damaged by the cold. Romaine lettuces stood upright and crisp, arugula was dark green and tender, radishes were unfazed, and the bed of endive, escarole, and radicchio looked ready to face whatever cold the weeks ahead might offer.

That 23 degree temperature reading came from my digital thermometer read indoors from a remote sensor out in the garden. Most surprising was the reading from the old-fashioned minimum/maximum registering mercury thermometer out in the garden. This thermometer remembered the night’s lowest temperature as 20 degrees F. Brrrrrrrr.

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Moving, figuratively, to warmer climes: the Mediterranean. I’m taking the Mediterranean diet one step further by trying to grow some of the delectable woody plants of that that region.

Figs are a big success, and not an unfamiliar sight well beyond their natural range. I’ve tried all the usual methods of growing them in cold climates. I’ve grown them in pots brought indoors for winter; I’ve bent over and covered or buried the stems to protect them from cold; I’ve swaddled the upright stems in leaves, straw, wood shavings, or other insulating materials. All yielded some fruit, but none of these methods beats having a small greenhouse with the trees planted right in the ground. Handfuls of soft figs, so ripe that each has a little drip from its “eye,” follow each sunny day and should do so for a few more weeks.

Bay (as in “bay leaf”) also does well, this one potted. After 20 years, my bay laurel is a handsome little tree, trained to a ball of leaves atop a single, four-foot trunk. The fresh leaves are much more flavorful, almost oily, than dried leaves, especially the old, dried leaves typically offered for sale.

Three hopeful Mediterranean transplants are my olive, feijoa, and lemons. I purchased the olive tree in spring, whereupon it flowered and has actually set a single fruit! The feijoa, also known as pineapple guava, has two fruits on it, which might not seem like a big thing except that those two fruits represent the culmination of about 15 years of effort. (More on that some other time.) True, feijoa is native to South America, but it thrives and is often planted in Mediterranean climates. The same goes for lemon, except that it is native to Asia. My Meyer lemon hybrid, like the olive, was potted up this past spring and sports a single fruit.

The long shots among my Mediterreans are pomegranates. My two plants – the varieties Kazake and Salavastki – are cold-hardy, early ripening, sweet varieties from central Asia, so should do well here in a pot. (They are cold-hardy for pomegranates, down to a few degrees below zero degrees F.) They have yet to flower and fruit.

In a few weeks I’ll move all the potted fruits to the sunny window in my very cool basement, where winter weather is very Mediterranean-esque.

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Persimmon is another tree grown in Mediterranean countries, although it’s not native there. Up here, I grow American persimmon, an outdoor tree that is cold hardy to below minus 20 degrees F.. Besides yielding delectable fruits, it’s a tree that requires almost no care, not even pruning. Some of the tree’s branches are deciduous, naturally dropping in autumn.

Heavy winds of a few weeks ago took the persimmon’s self-pruning theme too far and blew the top off my 20 year old tree. Fortunately, my three other persimmon trees remained unscathed. I’ll just trim the break from the decapitated tree and it will be fine. That dead wood need not go to waste; it’s used to make high quality golf clubs. Not for me; I couldn’t get out of the garden long enough.

Looks like another of my rosemary plants has bit the dust. And this one did so very early in the season. Too bad, because it was a very elegantly trained tree form rosemary.

I brought this rosemary plant indoors a couple of weeks ago. With outside air streaming in through frequently opened windows and flames dancing in the woodstove only occasionally, the plant, along with other newly moved houseplants, would – should – have had time to gradually acclimate to the drier, warmer air indoors. I paid careful attention to watering, even filled the saucers beneath the pots with water to raise the local humidity and supply some water from below by capillary action.

The photo at left is of my rosemary plant pre-death.

I evidently didn’t pay enough attention to the rosemary tree. The problem with rosemary plants is that their thin, stiff leaves never wilt to show that the plants are thirsty. My plant finally showed its thirst by suddenly raining desiccated leaves to the floor as I brushed by it.

I seem to lose a (nicely trained) rosemary every few years. Fortunately, experience has taught me to always have one or more young plants in the wings awaiting just such a calamity.

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I could have such fun with this horticultural treat. My garden is going “nuts.” I’m feeling “nutty.” I’m “squirreling away” food for winter.

In this case, some of that food is actually “nuts.” Right now we have 6 half-bushel baskets filled to the brim with husked, washed, dried black walnuts. Squirrels and many of us humans are extremely fond of this nut’s rich flavor, different and much more distinctive than the English walnuts found in markets. Black walnuts are all over the place, free for the taking.

Allow me to backtrack to a week or so ago . . . That’s when black walnuts, nestled in their soft, green, tennis-ball-sized husks, started dropping in earnest. They shed heavily each year when the trees are just about leafless. Strong winds helped, of course.

The first step in preparing the nuts is to de-husk them, which my wife Deb does with the aid of rubber gloves and a light, one-hand sledge hammer. The gloves are to keep the juice, used to stain wood and clothe, from staining her hands. She dumps a few nuts on the ground, hits them with the hammer to loosen the husks, then twists the husks off, dropping the husks into one bucket and the golfball-sized nuts into another.

My job is to clean the husked nuts. I spread them on a screen and hose them off.

Then the nuts need to be dried, which we do by spreading them on a cloth on our sun-drenched deck. The danger here is pilfering by squirrels. Fortunately, the deck is also where Leila and Scooter, our two squirrel-hungry dogs, spend a lot of time in half sleep. We gather the nuts up into half-bushel baskets to bring indoors each night and on rainy days. The nuts are sufficiently dry, and not prone to mold, after a few sunny days.

Once the nuts are dry, it is very important NOT to eat them. At least not yet, because they taste too “green.” Instead, we put them away somewhere cool and squirrel-proof to cure until January, at which point they are delicious. That is, once you get to the meat, which you can do with a hammer or – much, much more easily and with less finger trauma– with a special nutcracker. I use the “Master Nut Cracker.” Come January, I look forward to re-visiting those “nutty” baskets now in storage.

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I envy nongardeners and my pre-gardening life after nights like last night, October 14^th. Everyone feels the weather generally cooling, but temperatures around freezing are critical to us gardeners. Last night, temperatures dropped to 28 degrees in my garden.

That temperature definitively signals the end of peppers, basil, summer squash, and other summer vegetables. That temperature also tells me to start readying cold weather vegetables, such as lettuce, cabbage, radishes, and arugula for even colder weather in the offing. My goal is to continue picking fresh vegetables from the garden for salads and for cooking on into December.

Today I draped floating row covers, which are lightweight fabrics permeable to water, light, and some air, over beds of cold weather vegetables. Floating row covers offer about 4 degrees of cold protection. I’ll do more when temperatures drop further.

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A few months ago I wrote that I once saw eye to eye with ex-President Bush – that was H. W. Bush, and we saw eye to eye about broccoli. Neither of us thought much of broccoli, in my case, it was my own, home-grown broccoli that failed to please.

This year I thought I’d make a real effort to grow good broccoli to see if perhaps I could effect an about face. The crop from my first planting was awful. I persevered with a second planting, sown in seed flats in June, for a fall crop. I gave each plant adequate spacing (2 feet apart in the row, 2 rows per 3 foot wide bed), planted them in soil enriched with soybean meal and an inch depth of compost, and kept an eye out for cabbage worms. The heads have been ripening in this cooler weather, and I’ve been making sure to harvest while the buds are still tight.

All this effort has paid off: The broccoli is delicious. Bush, you’re wrong.

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Home-grown apples can be quite delicious. That is, if you get to harvest any decent fruits, which you likely will not do if you grow apples east of the Rocky Mountains. Over much of the eastern U.S., apples have a few but very serious pest problems. If you don’t spray appropriate materials at just the right moments (note the plural), you usually do not get anything worth eating.

Which brings me to the workshop I held last weekend on backyard fruits. I suggested growing fruits that have few or no pest problems, preferably those that don’t even need the precise, annual pruning demanded by apple trees. To whit: For some easy to grow tree fruits, consider pawpaw, American persimmon, and/or medlar. They all have unique flavors reminiscent of, respectively, banana, apricot, and applesauce. Plus, they require no spraying and little or no pruning. All are quite ornamental, so do double duty as landscape plants also.

A couple of other fruits were also ripe for discussion and tasting. Hardy kiwifruits, everyone agreed, were delicious, similar to but sweeter and more flavorful than the fuzzy kiwifruits of the market. They’re grape-sized with smooth skins and you just pop them, whole, into your mouth. They are also easy to grow except that they must be pruned religiously unless you don’t mind them smothering an arbor or trellis, with the subsequent fruit becoming hard to pick.

Another tasty fruit now ripe, this one on a shrub, is – dare I mention it – autumn olive. Yes, I know it’s very invasive. On some bushes, the pea-sized fruits have lost their astringency and are very tasty. With silvery leaves, autumn olive is also quite ornamental.

All these fruits are among those dual purpose “luscious landscape” plants I describe in my book Landscaping with Fruit.

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We also saw some beautiful nuts – trees and shrubs, that is – at the workshop. First were filberts, also known as hazelnuts. I’ve grown both the American and European types. I no longer grow the American types, which are native to eastern U.S., because, although resistant to filbert blight, the nuts are small and somewhat bitter. However, their leaves turn a beautiful color in autumn.

European filberts bear large, tasty nuts. Blight resistant varieties of European filberts were recently developed, and they grow to make large shrubs whose stems arch out from the base of the plant like a fountain of water. I grow the varieties Santiam, Hall’s Giant, Lewis, and Clark, all bearing within 3 years of planting.

And finally we came to chestnuts, another nut with its own blight. This blight was introduced from Asia. American chestnuts are killed back by chestnut blight but resistance and tasty nuts are found in Asian chestnut species. I grow a few varieties of Asian hybrids, including the variety Colossal and a seedling, both of which bore within 5 years of planting, and the varieties Peach and Eaton, which are still young.

Chestnuts are beautiful, spreading trees with healthy looking, glossy green leaves that will soon turn a rich, golden color. Every day now I pick up golfball-sized, buffed brown nuts that drop from Colossal’s branches.