Don't get me wrong. Harvesting is fun, and sort of spiritual, especially when you do have days like today of the brilliant blue sky and warm sun. At the end of the day, however, I was so exhausted that it wasn't until well after we'd had dinner and were relaxing on our deck that I remembered that I had wanted to go through our bush bean plants and pick some fresh ones for dinner.
Harvesting is one of the ways that my husband Jim's statement that "it's a good life, a hard life but good" starts to make sense.
We hadn't particularly planned to make today a day of harvesting. That's another characteristic that I'm learning about harvests. You can't plan it, entirely. When the vegetables are ready, they're ready. They don't care whether you are or not.
Our day began with our usual Saturday morning trek to the farmers market. Only this Saturday we got up extra early because Jim had made pasta from scratch and we had wanted to toss it with our garlic scape pesto and fresh cherry tomatoes from the garden to prepare a dish for one of the farmer families that had taught us so much and given us so much of their own goodwill and good spirit over the past three years. Going out into the gardens at 7:30 a.m. made me acutely aware of how different our crops look first thing in the morning when the sun is still climbing up the horizon and the night's dew is still moistening the fruits. Going out that early also made me aware that a lot of tomatoes, cucumbers, and both summer and winter squash were ripening fast. If left on the vines too long, these vegetables can either rot or become too large and less flavorful. After the market, I went for a run and then headed out into the gardens, planning to spend the afternoon staking our overflowing tomatoes and doing some weeding. In the midst of this project, tomatoes -- both red and green -- began dropping literally into my lap. Staking and weeding quickly evolved into gathering up tomatoes, as well.
As I fetched a bin for the tomatoes, I walked by our squash. It is literally everywhere -- as squash tends to be -- and vines of different varieties wove in and out of each other. Carefully treading my way through the squash so that I would not disturb the sweet potato vines, which also had decided to meander in multiple directions away from their roots, I noticed that some of the leaves on the far end of the beds seemed to have picked up a sort of mildew. I also noticed that several vines were sporting one huge squash and several smaller ones. I decided that I needed to cut the larger fruits so that the plants could put their energy into helping the smaller ones grow. So my quick trip for a bin for tomatoes became a quest also for my favorite chef's knife for cutting squash stems from their vines. And then came the third discovery: turnips had pushed themselves out of the soil beautifully round and fully mature. They had almost harvested themselves, and needed someone to pick them up.
I spent the next hour harvesting. I gathered about 30 tomatoes, and about 25 squash. I also pulled up about a dozen turnips, several carrots, and, almost as an afterthought, remembered to cut several leaves of kale for dinner. My harvesting also yielded an overgrown radish, and a couple of red onions that were almost lost in the thicket of weeds.
As the rainbow of vegetables in my wagon grew brighter and more varied, my arms began to tire and my neck began to ache. I actually had to sit down periodically and rest because of the work I was doing.
If all that wasn't enough, the weight of the squash made the wagon extremely heavy. I grimaced as I pulled it out of the garden, around the edge of the chicken coop and the compost head, and past the barn toward our house.
"What's wrong?" Jim asked me worriedly. "You look like you're crying."
"There's nothing to cry about," I said gesturing toward the wagon. "But I am tired. I can't believe how heavy these squash are."
He grinned and pulled the wagon to the edge of the deck. By sunset, we had sorted produce, gotten the tomatoes indoors, the turnips ready for washing, and the kale trimmed and cut into pieces and rinsed in a colander. The kale, with one of the squash and some corn we had bought from one of the local farmers, became our dinner -- along with a piece of striped bass and a small porgy fillet e had gotten from the local vendor.
Midway through the meal, I remembered the beans. And realized that while we had had a good day of harvesting, it was only the beginning.
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