The Busy Time

This is the busy time of year for a gardener. Lots of picking, preserving, enjoying, and hand-wringing over frost forecasts to be done. We managed to leave town for 10 days at the end of August. We had a great time, going to a friend's wedding, visiting family, and experiencing Yellowstone for the first time. I promise I'll get some photos onto my photoblog soon. But the reality of what it means to leave a garden alone for that long came crashing back to us the day after we got home. We harvested about 100 pounds of zuchhini and yellow squash, a pile of tomatoes, corn, basil, green beans, parsley, and so on.
Maybe you're not really a home gardener if you don't have a humongus out-of-control zuchhini story. Here is ours.
There is a tradition of sorts in Monument. If you have extra produce that you want to give away, you can take it to the post office and leave it by the front door. This works out well, because almost everyone in town goes to the post office every day. We had already divested ourselves of quite a few tasty little yellow crooknecks and little zuchhinis this way, so we thought we'd try to get rid of the giants too. And giants they were. We packed them into boxes and headed for the post office on Monday afternoon. We gave a couple golden goodies away on the way to the post office. I think that this gave me false hope...
G. said that the postmaster had a good laugh at our hopeless stack of mutants and predicted that we'd be hauling them home again the next day. Sure enough, when we went to the post office on Tuesday, most of them were still there. We decided that they hadn't been there long enough, so we picked up the remains on Wednesday, and they are sitting sullenly in the kitchen. We actually did get rid of a few of them. The biggest zuchhini was gone. I can't imagine actually eating that one without some kind of special procedure... Perhaps someone used it for a canoe, or as practice ammo for a pumpkin catapult.
OK. I just went and counted the remaining squash. Although we still have a monster zuchhini, there are only 4 yellow squash remaining. They just look like more because they are huge. That means we divested ourselves of at least 15 yellow squash in two days. If I calculate right, in a town of 70-ish households (including those who already have their own gardens and thus their own squash overload to deal with), that's a 21% market success rate. One-in-five Monument households enjoyed(?) one of our yellow squash last week. I can't possibly complain about that kind of success!

In other giant harvest news, I think I never really knew before that basil could take up space. I picked maybe five pounds of basil last weekend! Carefully washed and jammed into a gallon bag, it takes up quite a bit of space in the freezer. Combined with a similar quantity of parsley, there's very little space left in the freezer.

[I must momentarily rant about our fridge. Though it seems to work OK, it is definitely getting on in years and will need to be replaced soon. It's very noisy and seems to run continually. This runnning all the time thing is defined as a "feature" in the owners' manual. Something about greater efficiency from drawing power constantly. Doesn't sound right to me, but whatever. Anyways, the real problem with our fridge is that it is a side-by-side model. I have no idea why or how these can be more popular than top-freezer fridges. I think they SUCK. There's not enough width on the fridge side for something like a cake, and not enough in the freezer side for just about anything. The freezer is a mad tumble of things piled on top one another, and the fridge is almost as bad. I spend a lot of time looking for things in the fridge, lolling around with the door open, wondering why I can't find ANYTHING in there. In our last house, we had a nice, new top-freezer fridge, and we really miss it.]

Back on topic. I don't know much about corn culture, but I think we got a pretty good harvest from our Golden Bantam corn. With 24 plants, I have so far picked at least 48 ears of varying size & quality, and there's more coming. Some of the corn on this plant is very weird. Early in the summer, the plants split at the base into three main stems. I thought about pruning off the side stems, but decided to let them go and see what happened. On the main stems, the corn developed in a sort of picture-postcard way, with a tassel at the top and two nice-sized ears in the middle. The side stems did some wacky things. Some developed tassel-ears at the top, where a husk grew up around the tassel, and little corn nibs started growing at the base of the tassel. Some grew half-length ears with giant niblets that looked like false teeth. Some stems shot off four or more teeny ears in a cluster, probably doomed to never mature. Some grew a tassel and no ears. I thought the variability was kind of neat. Corn is such a domesticated plant and I would think that it had long ago been bred into pure predictability. All the same, I think I will prune the side-shoots in the future.

Yesterday, we picked tomatoes, eggplant, and corn, then went to the orchard and picked 41 pounds of peaches, apples, and nectarines. I made moussaka for dinner last night, and will be making peach jam sometime next week. I hope we eventually get a flush of tomatoes for making sauce and canning, but until then I am downing BLT's (well, BT's) like there's no tomorrow, scarfing down peaches, and feasting nightly on corn on the cob or green beans. Can't beat that.