Bountiful Harvest

Arms full of basil, red, yellow, and green peppers. Tomatoes of all shapes and sizes. Lettuce and even some banana peppers. A few choice strawberries and lots of flowers. And the only fertilizer used came from worm castings. I’m not quite ready to enter the county fair, but this labor of love netted some fine eating this summer. Here I am with almost the final harvest, though I’m still pulling a tomato or two a day. I put up 24 freezer bags of pesto and we have had abundant salads.

Already I am planning next summer and how I can rearrange rows so that the spinach doesn’t get so leggy and that the tomatoes get more sun and I want to put in more peppers so that we can stuff more with that yummy rice concoction we came up with and put them in the freezer.

All last week I was obsessed with the economy in free fall. I wrung my hands and spent waaaay too many hours watching growth charts plummeting like pelicans, hoping the next economist they put on the panel would have one positive thing to say. Not one did. The campaign kept getting nastier. The news was just bad all around, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. And I twisted my knee, which didn’t help my mood or my ability to walk off my anxiety. Even when I turned off the flat screen fear machine to escape into fiction, it was bad news. Reading a fictionalized biography of Nefertiti (in anticipation of the big trip to Cairo) wouldn’t you know the court of Egypt came down with the plague and four of the six of Pharaoh’s kids died. I know it is a few thousand years late to feel bad for them, but I did. I was just feeling bad all ’round.

Here’s what I almost forgot. I forgot this picture that Michael had snapped the week before. That these cool breezes that will ultimately be followed by warm ones — and another planting season.

‘Course next year I may be planting with a little more sense of urgency if the economy doesn’t turn around, but it’s comforting to know that Mother Nature and the worm bins in the basement have our back.