Ah, Rottery

I love to look at my garden in the winter, not because it is beautiful (a garden can be at its best in winter; mine is not) but because it is so bare and so ruined and will be once more so soft and so sweet.” ---Henry Mitchell, One Man's Garden



My garden is in rich, rotten ruins.


I have been reading A Trail Through Leaves: The Journal As A Path To Place by Hanna Hinchman. In it I am discovering some amazing words; “rottery” is one of them. “There’s no such word,” I’m told by my husband. “Of couse there is,” I say. I Google it. The British tabloids seem to favor the word to describe the deeds of a scoundrel, a dastardly act. But rottery in the garden...we're thinking of something else entirely. A type of decrepitude, yes, but more benign; decay with a purpose, part of a larger plan. This morning I went to examine the rottery in my garden, and found it in abundance.
Rosa "Perfect Moment" is still blooming earnestly.
But beneath its branches I find rottery. All roses must rest or they'll bloom themselves to death, I've heard. Leaves, dark, spotty, slimey have fallen to cover the bird bath. One rose blossom lies in repose on its soaked bed. One of the bird bath's concrete birds lies undone, fallen, forgotten, foul.

Deeper into the garden, I tromp a path covered in fallen tree leaves, sodden and wet from recent rain. Steam rises from the dense blanket as the morning warms.

It is unseemly to be still picking tomatoes in January. They ripen unsuccessfully indoors; most of them crack and mold and turn to mush on the kitchen counters. A few we'll eat; we'll make fried green tomatoes. The rest will go to the green waste can, where they will moulder in peace.

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Okay, it is later in the day. My frugal nature rose up, and wouldn't let me throw away all of those perfectly good green tomatoes, so I made a version of Easy Green Tomato Chutney. I chopped up about 5 pounds or more of the tomatoes, added 2 cups of golden raisins, 1 very large chopped onion, 3 cups of light brown sugar, firmly packed, 1 ½ cups vinegar, a lavish amount of Cajun Creole seasoning (the real recipe calls for 2 tablespoons mixed pickling spices, but I didn’t have any, and my mix had many of the same ingredients), 2 teaspoons chili powder, 2 tablespoons chopped crystallized ginger, and 2 cups of chopped apples (I had some dried ones in the pantry). I brought it all to boil and simmered it for a long while. We had it for dinner with salmon fillets and brussel sprouts – yum – and I put a few containers in the freezer to keep…