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As I later found out, I was probably the only child in America in the 1970s who actually ate my vegetables. Little did I know that my peers across the country were hiding peas and carrots in napkins or milk cups, sitting cross-armed refusing to eat, and otherwise disparaging anything that came from a plant.

“Kids are smart, they know a shoddy knockoff,” Papa said. “Not only don’t the supermarket vegetables taste good, they didn’t have the nutritional value of vegetables grown and picked from your own garden.”

Learning from his enthusiasm, I would come to know each month of spring, summer, and fall by what it produced. May meant Jerusalem artichokes boiled and covered with butter like a new potato but tasting crisper and fresher—tasting of spring. Asparagus poked from the earth in stiff tufted spears to be snapped off and steamed to an even brighter green, making our pee smell of wet money.

June brought snap peas, lettuces, spinach, spring onions, and wild edibles, including dandelion greens, purslane, nasturtium flowers, sorrel, and the succulent sea grass found along the beach. July saw yellow summer squash, zucchini, purple and white cabbage, string beans, and tomatoes that had been started in the greenhouse. August produced more tomatoes than we knew what to do with and everything else—new potatoes, shell beans, bell peppers, celery, cucumbers, kohlrabi, turnips, parsnips, cauliflower, and broccoli. September and October were a bounty of melons, pumpkins, winter squash, garlic, and onions.

Fruits were also magically spaced across the summer by Mother Nature to make sure each month provided something for dessert. May was rhubarb, which we sautéed with honey to make a threaded tart-sweet pink mush that we ate over yogurt. June was strawberries; July, raspberries; August, wild and cultivated blueberries and blackberries. Late September, of course, was apples.

Under cover of darkness, Mama and Papa drove to the old Holbrook orchard and wildlife sanctuary, Jeep’s headlights off so as not to wake the sanctuary ranger, and me, age one and a half, nodding out in the back. Giddy in the shared adventure, they imagined themselves members of the French resistance in dark clothing, pillaging the orchards of the aristocracy.

Putting away enough food to get through the thin months of winter was a challenge we couldn’t afford to shirk. It was a simple equation: if we didn’t save enough food and money from summer, we would go hungry in winter. The obstacles were many. Canning seals didn’t hold, chipmunks ate apples stored in the woodshed, and vegetables rotted if the root cellar got too damp, but Mama and Papa held to the fact that humans had been surviving the winter for centuries without the conveniences of refrigerators and supermarkets. They were further encouraged by the Nearings’ words in Continuing the Good Life:

We can be and we are largely self-sufficient in food. Self-sufficient means that we can feed ourselves. During half a century of gardening there has never been a time when we have lacked a supply of organically grown produce. This food comes directly from the garden for a large part of the year. During the late fall, winter and early spring we have three additional sources of supply.

1. It may come from the sun-heated greenhouse where we grow lettuces, parsley, radishes, leeks, kale, spinach.

2. It may come from our root cellar where apples, potatoes, carrots, beets, rutabagas and other root vegetables are stored in bins of autumn leaves.

3. It may come from our stock of bottled soups and juices and applesauce which we put away during periods of surplus production and use when the garden is in deep freeze.

“The Nearings never mentioned stealing from abandoned orchards,” Mama joked.

“We’re obviously more resourceful.” Papa smiled, parking on the edge of the sanctuary’s dirt road. It wasn’t that the apples belonged to someone, they told themselves—the orchard had long ago been abandoned by the original owners—but they