We did it again. Last year I said “never again,” but we did it again. We planted a garden.
In 2015, nothing grew but enough tomatoes to make one small pan of tomato sauce that cost me a lot of time and a higher gas bill, cooking down the meager crop to the consistency of one jar of Prego that I could have picked up at the grocery store for $1.99.
Yet there is something satisfying about eating what you have grown and “putting up” summer vegetables for those bleak winter days. So that’s why this year, when my husband said “let’s try another garden,” I eagerly agreed because when summer is on the horizon and you begin to smell it in the air, you are willing to do just about anything that will bring it closer, sooner.
So, on a day in May when the temperatures were flirting with 70, we stopped at a local greenhouse where we gleefully and somewhat greedily picked out plant after plant after plant.
“I’ll grab a few more tomatoes. Remember last year?” I said, as my husband picked through the jalapeño plants.
Because they are so small, you think to yourself, we will need more of these. And more of these and these and those over there.
The next thing you know, you’re walking out with a flatbed cart filled with seedlings and seeds, your bank account is down about $200 and you both have mixed looks of madness and euphoria on your faces.
After a pickup bed full of manure and mushroom compost is worked into the ground (which doesn’t smell at all like summer, by the way), it’s time to plant. You think this is going to be the hard part because, after all, it is a tough row to hoe — people have been saying that since the 1800s.
But you don’t think of hoeing. You think of sweet succulent summer corn as you plant those little seeds. And you plant a lot of them.
And the tiny tomato plants are tenderly tucked into the earth with a whispered prayer to grow big and strong, along with little pepper, kale and cucumber plants. Lettuce seeds are scattered down a row and you begin to long for summer and the bounty that awaits you.
And when rains don’t come, the hose does, and your husband spends his days watering and hoeing those rows, and you wait some more.
And then? And then? One day you wake up to a proliferation of produce the likes of which you’ve never seen.
For some reason you have odd flashbacks to when your kids were young and friends would call and invite you out and you would have to say, “No, we can’t. We don’t have a baby sitter.” Or “Oh, we can’t go anywhere because all three kids have chicken pox.”
Only now the kids are grown but you are turning down your friends because you have peppers! Hundreds of them. Ripe right now. I tell you the truth, Peter Piper never picked more peppers.
I think I made every recipe you could make with Hungarian peppers. Jalapeño poppers? Six ways to Sunday.
Without mercy, the rest of the produce kept coming, and I guess that’s why it’s called produce.
We have eaten corn on the cob with every meal, blanched at least 20 dozen ears to put in the freezer and have given away a truckload. We’ve had kale and cucumber smoothies, cucumber and caprese salads and enough salsa to supply every Mexican restaurant in Medina and Summit counties.
I learned a long time ago not to try to can that stuff. The one time I did, less than a week later we were ducking metal canning lids and rings as the tops blew off the jars.
So when my friend offered me her Victorio food strainer and sauce maker I reluctantly agreed, as my husband waved a white, tomato-stained napkin from the kitchen table.
Using so many tomatoes they covered every surface in the room, I began to put the blanched beauties into that Amish-like contraption and turned the handle, awaiting its promise to separate my tomato puree from skins, seeds and stems, producing a no fuss, no muss sauce.
What I got instead, hours later, was a quart and a shot glass full of tomato juice. And tomato “guts” all over my kitchen when my motion detector trash can detected me and prematurely opened its lid, sending seeds and skins all over the floor, the wall and the dog’s dishes. Certainly not enough to can and potentially explode in the pantry.
So, as summer nears its end, I place a greater value on the ease of going to a local farmers market or store to buy three or four ears of corn at a time, on an “as needed basis” instead of dozens and dozens at the same time. The same is true with peppers and kale, cucumbers and lettuce. And tomatoes.
What I wouldn’t give for a little pint box of cherry tomatoes that someone else grew and I could just pop on a salad or in my favorite recipe, First Night in Florence Pasta.
No, never again. Because I don’t can. I just open them and I’m good with that.
Contact Robin Swoboda at Robinswoboda@outlook.com.