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.
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