My vegetable garden is beat up. What wasn’t hit by frost last week was trashed by Sunday’s wind. It is time to tear most of it apart and either plant winter rye or add a thick layer of hay. I usually do a combination of the two.

I am pleased with my hoophouse. I have baby kale, lettuce, beets, collards and radishes. I took some six-packs of parsley destined for the compost heap at Heather Gardens. They were pathetically root-bound but I planted them anyway. Here it is two weeks later and they actually look great. They simply needed to be set free.

In front of the old Tisbury Farm Market, across from the Little House Cafe, there is an impressive stand of cardoon. It is a cousin of the artichoke but much more hardy in our climate. I have them reseeded all over. They produce an amazing purple thistle-like flower in August. A few here and there in the perennial border are real conversation pieces.

Recently, Molly from Grey Barn Farm gave me celery. We talked at length about the virtues of growing it. It tends to be a big stringy and extremely celery-tasing. Some may not care for it. I love it. I was thinking about how our supermarket world has changed our tastebuds over the years. We prefer things more bland. Home grown chicken, for example, is way more flavorful than store-bought.

At any rate, I chopped the aforementioned celery, sauteed it with onions and cooked it forever in a nice Good Farm duck stock. After using a quick hand-held blender, I added cream and enjoyed an incredible cream of celery soup. Thanks, Molly.

The area that supported last year’s pigs was left fallow this summer. A large amount of small yellow pumpkins and a few large white ones grew on their own. I am going to attempt cooking a few but usually do not have good luck with these volunteers. They usually are bland and rather gourd-like. Oh well, it will not matter. I will still feed them to this year’s pigs.

I drove Violet back to Tabor Academy after a long weekend. We passed a yard in Wareham with the brightest red mulch imaginable. There was a flock of pink plastic flamingos as the yard art. We were pretty tickled and decided that red mulch deserved pink flamingoes. Then we lapsed into Wareham jokes like “Does Lady Gaga live there?”

Speaking of jokes, for months we have listened to Donald Trump bragging about his “yuge” lead in the polls. Now, when those same polls seem to be swinging in the other direction, he is singing a different tune. Now, he says that because of the evil media and crooked Hillary, the polls are completely fictional. He cannot get off the rigged election train. I fear for our sanity as a country whichever way the election turns out.

I did find it amusing that he would, in fact, support the election results if, in his own words, he wins. Oh, and one more thing. I do not use email but I am sure most users delete enormous numbers of them since they are stupid and useless. I know I get a remarkable amount of junk mail. There is so much in the Vineyard Haven post office that the trash barrels have been replaced with dumpster-sized bins. Just saying!