Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [89]
It’s not a proud thing to admit, but we were getting outsmarted by the pigweeds. We had gardened this same plot for years, but had surely never had this much of the quackgrass and all its friends. How did they get out of hand this year? Was it weather, fertility imbalance, inopportune tilling times, or the horse manure we’d applied? The heat of composting should destroy weed seeds, but doesn’t always. I looked back through my garden journals for some clue. What I found was that virtually every entry, every late June and early July day for the last five years, included the word weeds: “Spent morning hoeing and pulling weeds…. Started up hand tiller and weeded corn rows…. Overcast afternoon, good weeding weather…. Tied up grape vines, weeded.” And this hopeful entry: “Finished weeding!” (Oh, right.) It’s commonly said that humans remember pleasure but forget pain, and that this is the only reason women ever have more than one child. I was thinking now: or more than one garden.
In addition to weeding, we spent the July 4 weekend applying rock lime to the beans and eggplants to discourage beetles, and tying up the waist-high tomato vines to four-foot cages and stakes. In February, each of these plants had been a seed the size of this o. In May, we’d set them into the ground as seedlings smaller than my hand. In another month they would be taller than me, doubled back and pouring like Niagara over their cages, loaded down with fifty or more pounds of ripening fruit per plant.
This is why we do it all again every year. It’s the visible daily growth, the marvelous and unaccountable accumulation of biomass that makes for the hallelujah of a July garden. Fueled only by the stuff they drink from air and earth, the bush beans fill out their rows, the okra booms, the corn stretches eagerly toward the sky like a toddler reaching up to put on a shirt. Cucumber and melon plants begin their lives with suburban reserve, posted discreetly apart from one another like houses in a new subdivision, but under summer’s heat they sprawl from their foundations into disreputable leafy communes. We gardeners are right in the middle of this with our weeding and tying up, our mulching and watering, our trained eyes guarding against bugs, groundhogs, and weather damage. But to be honest, the plants are working harder, doing all the real production. We are management; they’re labor.
The days of plenty suddenly fell upon us. On the same July 4 weekend we pulled seventy-four carrots, half a dozen early onions, and the whole garlic crop. (Garlic is fall-planted, braving out the winter under a cover of straw.) We dug our first two pounds of gorgeous new potatoes, red-skinned with yellow flesh. With the very last of the snap peas we gathered the earliest few Silvery Fir Tree and Sophie’s Choice tomatoes, followed by ten more the next day. Even more thrilling than the tomatoes were our first precious cucumbers—we’d waited so long for that cool, green crunch. When we swore off transported vegetables, we’d quickly realized this meant life without cukes for most of the year. Their local season is short, and there’s no way to keep them around longer except as pickles. So what if they’re mostly just water and crunch? I’d missed them. The famine ended July 6 when I harvested six classic dark green Marketmores, two Suyo Longs (an Asian variety that’s serpentine and prickly), and twenty-five little Mini Whites, a gourmet cucumber that looks like a fat, snow-white dill pickle. The day after tomorrow we would harvest this many