“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”
— so says every serious kitchen gardener come September
The tiny seeds we planted and nursed as seedlings are now parents themselves, the evidence of our joint labors heralded by vines and trellis, rows and fields, all full of fruits and roots and flowers; the hard work of planting and caring for our vegetable children overshadowed by the much harder work of harvest and preservation.
During the first few years of having a big garden, this time of year also included a lot of bookkeeping. I tried to keep track of which varieties did best and which crops failed, so I could diagnose my successes and failures and do better the next year. Then I had kids, and throwing some seeds in the ground was about all I could handle.
It’s a gamble
For several summers in a row, I was surprised to see anything come up and couldn’t remember from spring to fall what I’d planted. Much to my surprise, and a little to my chagrin, benign neglect didn’t affect my garden’s productivity as much as I thought it would.
The truth is Northern Plains gardening is a gamble from start to finish. Potatoes do terrible one year; tomatoes do great, so you plant more tomatoes the following spring. The next summer will be damp and cold, and the tomatoes will have barely flowered, while the lettuces produce crop after crop after crop.
Now that I have more than a decade of gardening experience here, I realize there really is no “normal.” I go for diversity and try not to get too attached to the results.
Take this summer, for example, which started out exceptionally wet and cool. We spent June harvesting leafy greens, and waiting to see if any of the sun-loving plants would get a chance to thrive. July and August were almost non-stop heat and wind.
It hasn’t rained, not even a few passing drops, in over a month. This would be okay for some of the plants if not for the fact that this summer’s only real bumper crop has been grasshoppers. They don’t seem to like tomatoes, but almost every other green plant in the garden has been eaten down to ribs and stems.
In abundance
Thus, tomatoes we have, and we have in abundance. The table and counter already teem with a rainbow of hues and a variety of sizes, despite my haphazard efforts to start canning. It’s still so hot, that I dare not run the stove in the house, but the slow cooker and stove top in one of the outbuildings has been running from dawn until dusk.
I am proud to say all my tomato plants came from seeds I’ve saved over the last few years, so at least part of their success is probably that they’ve already known a few generations of hardship. Like many of my neighbors, the aforementioned saved seeds made it to plant form by being tough enough to handle whatever crazy conditions summer on the prairie throws their way.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to focus on how much we will have (tomato sauce, stewed tomatoes, tomato salsa), and not how much we won’t have (almost everything else.) And happily, my attempts at positive thinking are working.
My paternal grandfather emigrated from Italy as a young man, and my memories of going to my grandparent’s house all have the smell of simmering tomato sauce wafting through them. There really isn’t much that compares to a tomato plucked fresh off the vine, still warm from the late summer sunshine. Ditto for sauce made from those tomatoes, bubbling in the pot in the darkest cold of midwinter.
Out in the pasture, the wild fruit beckons as well. The secret stands of plums, the soft wash of red on the buffalo berry bushes, the winding scarves of purple grapes linger at the edges of the last of the heat. We collect tomatoes by the bushel and the birds feast out in the fields.
This will all be over soon enough, but we pretend we don’t notice and keep gathering.
