Bountiful summer

It has been a while since my last post. In the past three weeks a lot has happened to pull me away from the garden and from writing about it: weekend get-a-ways to beautiful wild places like Opal Creek, my little brother’s wedding on our family farm, and the emotional process of quitting my job of five years.

The garden persists despite my sporadic and cursory visits, when I barely manage to throw down a little water and fill my pockets with tomatillos and my arms with cucumbers. Harvests are coming not like a trickle, but like a giant gushing waterfall. The refrigerator is packed to the gills. We eat generous quantities of vegetables in all form and fashion for at least two, and sometimes three, square meals a day. I’ve lost five pounds, because who has room for bread or protein? And, in case you are wondering, yes, the pantry and the chest freezer are filling up too.

I’ve turned tomatoes and hot peppers into red hot sauce, cucumbers into bread and butter, sour, and mustard-scented pickles, and zucchini into cookies and chocolate zucchini bread. A twelve pound bag of tomatoes from a fellow gardener became six quarts of tomato sauce that will help get us through the winter. Plums from a friend’s fruit-laden tree rest in the dehydrator, slowly giving up their moisture so that I may enjoy them and the memory of summer in the dead of winter. Enormous 'Brandywine' and 'Kellogg’s Breakfast' tomatoes mingle with delicate pieces of fresh basil atop homemade pizzas.

So, what else is there to say? Anyone could have predicted this post. It is summer. The world is generous. I’ve just forsaken my day-job salary for happiness, and I’ve never felt so rich.

The ant and the grasshopper

A stretch of somewhat overcast days in the mid 70s have settled into the city. We’ve turned off the ceiling fan, the portable fan, and the window fan. We wear clothes again in the house. The world feels less volatile now, and in the garden things are more calm as well. No more frantic watering on a daily basis or trying to keep up with rapid-fire green beans. This week, the harvest was sane: Everbearing strawberries, tomatillos, a few more pale orange 'Kellogg’s Breakfast' heirloom tomatoes, and cucumbers. 

With an eye toward fall planting, we headed to the Elephant Garlic Festival in North Plains yesterday for garlic sets. After sampling more raw garlic slivers than my stomach could handle, we ended up with two hardneck varieties, 'Purple Glazer' and 'Chesnok Red'. In addition, we got a good dose of country fair complete with roasted corn (This is a ridiculous thing to eat in public, and so we took it as an opportunity for performance and made big messes of ourselves), soft pretzels and a pulled pork sandwich. All of this came with the option to be smothered in garlic butter, and who can say no to that? On the way home we meandered to Mike and Debbie’s Produce in Forest Grove for corn to put by.

The cucumbers have been brined and will soon make their way into mason jars. The tomatillos have been husked for salsa. The corn has been deconstructed; the kernels stripped from their cobs, packed and frozen, and the cobs simmered down into stalk that now sits next to the kernels in the freezer.  Like last year, I’m the forward looking ant. But this year, I’m vowing to not take on the worrisome nature of the little guy. The grasshopper knows a thing or two as well, and I’m going to keep his playful nature in mind as I get ready for winter. Pleasure, not worry, is my guide.

Talking about the weather

It is, at this point (day six of "hot"), redundant to speak of the heat. Save the lucky ones with air conditioned lives, we are sick of the oppressive mugginess and sick of hearing ourselves talk about it. 

Much like during the snow and ice storms of last winter, Portlanders are generally ill-equipped to deal with extreme weather such as this. We escape to climate controlled movie theaters and libraries, to the sprinkler in the park or the kiddy pool in a friend’s back yard. Mostly though, we just wait it out, complaining all the way. In less grumpy moments, we might even laugh at ourselves, in a sad sort of way, as we express our relief when the temperature drops to 98. 

Rarely do we experience a summer like this in Portland. Usually the whole damn thing passes with many of us still hungry for warmth and sun. Well, I for one am sorry for all my past complaining, and welcome at any moment, a reprieve.

But in the mean time, and on the bright side, some of the fruits of the garden are living it up. Corn loves the heat, so we’ve been eating as much of it as we can to remind us of the benefits at hand. The sun has also led to an explosion of perfect plums on the tree at our community garden. And so, I am also grateful to this particular summer for giving me delicious plum cobbler and plum ice cream. If truth be told, although it is sort of miserable, it is at the same time somehow wonderful. This weather has allowed all of us to feel a new way in this same old place, which is always pretty great.