The Bounty

Weather means more when you have a garden.

There's nothing like listening to a

shower and thinking how it is soaking

in around your green beans. ~Marcelene Cox

Our vegetable garden is a huge success this year. Despite a slow start, we have two types of bush bans, pole beans, 2 types of carrots, onions, potatoes, 4 varieties of tomatoes, two types of cucumbers, zucchini, yellow squash, spaghetti squash, water melon, pumpkins and green peppers. In addition, this is year two for our asparagus plants - so we look forward to next year when we can finally harvest them! Cap, especially this year, having a bit more time on his hands, is spending long hours tilling, planting, weeding and most of all trying to keep the wild rabbits & beetles from eating everything green that we grow. 25 years ago, when I first moved into this house I tried some serious gardening. I devoted long hours to planting and tending to them I would freeze what we couldn't use and even spent a bit of time canning tomatoes. This of course was in the 80's and I was a new homeowner & stay-at-home mom trying to do it all. Although Martha Stewart hadn't come into the picture yet, I gardened because it seemed the logical if not cool thing to do. Somewhere along the way, jobs, after school kids activities (we didn't call 'em playdates then) an unhappy 1st marriage, eventual divorce, and single parenthood made this back to nature thing a lot less appealing. Staying up 'til midnight baking and freezing zucchini breads suddenly made absolutely no sense and carried zero appeal, knowing I had to be up at 6 to get three kids off to school and myself to work by 8:30. a.m. Since Cap & I were married in 2000, we quickly returned to gardening. We started small, and have worked up to a 30 x 18 garden that, by next year will have at least doubled in size since we're tired of all the crawling plants (zucchini, cucumbers, etc.) strangling all the other plants. We garden purposefully, with a sense that growing our own food is necessary. Not only is homegrown food better for you, it tastes so much better. And with food prices what they are in the supermarkets - rising almost as fast as gas prices - it just makes sense. The tomatoes that you get in the grocery stores in winter barely resemblance the real sun-ripened tomato from your backyard or the farm a few miles down the road. You can't pick up a newspaper or magazine without finding at least one article on the need for reliable supplies of locally grown foods to counter rising oil prices and rising food prices. I suppose then, we're doing our little part. Tiny part perhaps, with our little garden. A few days ago, after returning from the supermarket stunned at the price of a gallon of milk and ground beef, I told Cap that that if the prices get any higher, we may have to consider becoming vegetarians. He responded with an adamant "No... If it gets that bad, we can just plan on eating the rabbits that love our garden so much!" That's my husband, resourceful if nothing else!

Today's bounty included more than 2 dozen cucumbers, a few yellow & green squash, a spaghetti squash, a half dozen onions, about a lb of carrots and a handful of cherry tomatoes:

And if spending 2 hours in sun collecting them wasn't fun enough, now it's time to wash and store them til I am ready to use them. Of course there is no way we're gonna eat 2 dozen cukes in the next few days, so I guess I'll also be delivering them to neighbors as well!