A big, whole hearted thank you to everyone who came out to our party on Saturday. We had a great turnout, nothing burned down except the bonfire, musicians played and guests joined in, and there was loads of tasty food. Best of all there were lots of kids, and I got to hold a baby for at least 20 minutes before he started crying. Hopefully the drunken revelers (myself included) didn’t keep the campers with children up all hours of the night. Stay tuned if you missed it, we’ll do it again in spring.
On Wednesday night we got the big one: the first real freeze. The farm was icy and beautiful. The only casualty was the snap peas, which surprised me. The vines were fine, but the peas themselves froze, shattering cell walls and leaving the pods cracked, striated, and soon to rot.
Our off-the-vine tomatoes are the last glimpse of summer’s fading. [I know it’s not fair to talk about tomatoes when you aren’t getting any in the shares this week, but it’s important for the story so bear with me] Only a few have ripened, and we had tomato sandwiches for lunch. Once these are gone, we will not eat a fresh tomato until next July. We’ll be buying canned tomatoes for stews and chili – we only managed to put up salsa and bloody mary mix (priorities?) – but no more tomato sandwiches. There are tomatoes in the grocery store, but I won’t buy them. And not because I am exercising my will, and not because we have some rule about it. It is because I don’t want to. I would rather wait for a good tomato than eat a lousy one.
Eating with the seasons does not feel like deprivation to me. It feels like appreciation. It is a celebration of the abundance of every time of year. Now is salad time. I missed green salads all summer, and now I can gorge myself. I eat two salads with dinner. I could have bought lettuce at the grocery store, but I would have been disappointed. Besides lettuce, I am celebrating carrots. Homegrown carrots don’t get the same airtime as homegrown tomatoes, which is a shame. (case in point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoDVEIUR4xs&feature=related)
The difference between a grocery store carrot and a carrot from the garden is every bit as dramatic as an heirloom tomato versus an orangey-red soft ball from Florida. And this is what I don’t understand; how do they get those carrots to taste so bad? Is it simply because they’ve been sitting in the cooler for a month? Are commercial varieties to blame? Quick growth from synthetic fertilizers that doesn’t leave anytime for taste to develop? I don’t mean to sound all high and mighty, but it’s not like we do anything special to make our carrots sweet. We put the seeds in the ground, weed them, water them, and wait. We grow good varieties, pick them the day before you get them, and don’t use chemical fertilizers. Let’s raise the bar a little for carrots, shall we?
Whether or not you eat fake tomatoes or carrots while you wait for the real ones to come around isn’t the point. The point of all this rambling is that waiting is good. Eating with the seasons isn’t a chore, it is a gift. Because we can tell the difference.
