Suffice it to say that I’m not the world’s best singing-to-plants and happily weeding-all-day sort of gardener. But I wanted to grow my own food, and boy, did I ever. As such, I’ve just experienced an honest-to-the-invisible-beasts-in-the-sky Harvest. I’ve spent the past two weeks making salsa and sauces and oh my god the pickles and blanching and freezing and I think I lost ten pounds from an acute gag reflex at the sight of food. The angel on my right shoulder tells me to deal with the fifty new tomatoes ripening every day. The devil on the other tells me that if I ignore them they’ll go away. Then he puts it to me like a randy roughnecked teenager, and we share a Marlboro red and talk about Narcissus and Goldmund.
As much fun as that would be, the angel won out, unfortunately, because while I may be sick of them now, I’m a secret fiend for a homegrown tomato, damn.
Most illuminating among the endless dross of food preparation and storage research was The Christmas Pickle, an artifact of which I heard mention twice in as many days, which I thought was the stuff of mythology, or a poor person’s holiday gift. But no! The internet, as it is wont to do, set me straight. And so, there are jars of cucumbers pickling in cinnamon and clove and syrup and redhot candies. I don’t know if I dare eat one, but if I see you around Christmastime, pretend to be surprised. Plus, I have since found out that The Christmas Pickle is also referred to as a Tongue Pickle. So, it doesn’t matter whether it’s any good or not. They have become an instant staple.
It is my hope that, with the harvest nearing its end (brussels sprouts, black beans and corn and potatoes still to deal with) things will grind down enough for me to regale you, invisible-gods-of-the-internet, with honest-to-god Cooter Hollow Tales.
In the meantime, knowing that people on the Internet prefer to read in list form, here are some things I learned about growing one’s own food:
1> You don’t need that much lettuce.
Really, it was fun to grow mustard greens and arugula and red lettuce and endive, and for the first few weeks, there was nothing better than eating nearly-still-living greens for dinner every night. Remember those nights? Not really, because for two months now the thought of another fucking pile of lettuce is enough to make you run for a burger. And you don’t eat burgers.
2> Ditto cucumbers.
q.v. “Christmas Pickle.” Not knowing, yet, whether the Christmas Pickle is going to be worth its linguish name, you do know that if you have enough cucumbers to make them, you probably have too many.
3> Ditto squash.
Fuck. I don’t even eat that much squash. And he doesn’t like it at all. Where does that leave the squash? Target practice.
4> Dig deeper, even if it breaks your back.
Because I was using new ground, it should have been harrowed and hilled it a little deeper. Some things (I’m looking at YOU, carrots) came in prodigiously, but ended up a lot shorter than they might have, because they just couldn’t muscle their way through the virgin soil. Maybe this is something that will correct itself as I start to use the land a little more. Or maybe I should be less lazy.
5> Learn to respect the fine art of scattered planting.
Plant it all at the same time, and more or less, it all comes up at the same time. This leaves you exhausted, especially if you’re an insane person who plants two gardens full of stuff, are are too neurotic not to attempt to use it all. It’s fun to grow, but a chore to put away. If you forget to follow this one, it will kill you one of these years. Then they’d fight over the tongue pickles at your memorial service, and so much for any chances of a decent elegy after THAT.
6> Don’t obsess over the little bugs that get on everything early in the season.
I mean, you ate all that fucking lettuce even though some of it had holes in it. You might’ve finished your memoirs with the time you spent trying to squish bugs.
7> Figure out what went wrong with your garlic.
Right. This isn’t something I’ve learned at all. Yet. But something that, if I don’t put it down here, I’m likely to forget. My garlic, put down last October, was looking great for a while, then in early summer, starting to dry out, too soon, I thought. By mid August, it was almost all dry, so I yanked what I could, having already lost about half of it. What was left was about half the size I was expecting. I’ve dried it and started using it in sauces, and it tastes lovely. The cloves are fully grown, but there are only 3 or 4 cloves on every bulb. Tell me what I did wrong, and I’ll stick a jar of tongue pickles in your ear and tell you nasty things.