I’m not much of a vegetable gardener. I came to it late, preferring to load my garden up with flowers. Well, and tomatoes. You have to grow your own tomatoes. Store tomatoes might as well have come off a three-D printer. But vegetables in general didn’t interest me. If I could have grown an old-fashioned pork roast in acid soil with six hours of sunlight a day, I might’ve given it a go. Only recently have I discovered I like vegetables, and now I like them a lot. So, I’m growing vegetables.
But I didn’t really think you could achieve vegetables just by sticking tiny ones in the ground. I thought that was a rural legend. Even tomatoes are famously dicey around here. Some years they don’t even bother to fruit until a half-hour before winter. Most years they erupt with genuine tomatoes but the bottom halves of them turn into pudding. I have succeeded in raising tiny sculptures in the shape of Brussels sprouts and cauliflowers, but made entirely of insects. Squashes were always enthusiastic and downright rompy but the squirrels chomped into them before I could. I’ve never tried potatoes. Store-bought potatoes are cheap and I didn’t really believe fresh-dug potatoes were going to be any improvement over any other potatoes. Potatoes are fine, but they owe most of their glory to butter and cream and oil and fire.
What I didn’t expect was to have actual success with a crop, and so the next thing to undo me as a gardener was actual success, big success, early success, utterly unearned serendipitous success. I didn’t even that have penciled on the calendar. So sure. I grew vegetables, but did I harvest them? Not necessarily. I remember peering into my first broccoli plants for a few days, and then I was startled to see little tiny broccolis in there. Lordy! A couple days later one of them was the size of a tennis ball. This was promising. A mere few days later I could’ve rolled a strike with them, but I thought they’d hold off for one more day, when I wasn’t so busy. The next day they were in medicine-ball territory. I needed a wagon to wheel them to the kitchen. They bloomed before I got there. Broccoli pollinators banged their little bodies against the window.
Well okay then. Vegetables can be grown.
Did I learn? Let’s see. I have a lovely new cattle-fence arch in the garden which squashes failed to climb properly last year, so this year I went for the slam-dunk: scarlet runner beans. I’d heard they’re good little climbers. I don’t really like beans as much as I like other vegetables. They’re weird and squeaky. But they sure looked good on that arch, with their orange flowers smacking themselves against the blue sky! They hadn’t met across the top of the arch for too many days before it occurred to me: Okay, Broccoli-girl, probably you should check for beans about now.
No beans.
Here may I interject what happened when my sister Margaret, who had a fine vegetable garden in rural Maine, sent me out to check the tomato plants for hornworms while she cooked dinner? I popped out for a look. I wasn’t super confident about what tomato hornworms looked like, but the “worm” concept seemed clear, and I knew where the tomatoes were. I came back in the house. No hornworms, I reported happily.
Margaret squinted out of her kitchen window at the garden, thirty feet away. “They’re right there,” she said, jabbing at numerous points in space with her finger, and then encouraging me outside with a firm grip on my shirt collar.
The hornworms in question were nearly invisible because they were only the size of a roll of quarters and, I’ll add in my favor, exactly the same color as the tomato vines. Even with that new information, it took me a while to spot any others, while Margaret picked hornworms metronomically and flang them to Kingdom Come.
Here may I interject that my main purpose in the world is to amuse others and one shouldn’t expect to get a lot of actual work out of me?
Back to the present. My beans. I looked and looked. There were a few places where it appeared larval beans the size of chin hairs were starting up. I was pretty sure I hadn’t been hornswoggled by my new beans—yet—and was just about to turn away when I finally caught sight of a bean that I’d missed because it was only the size of a canoe.
There were dozens.
Um, just as I expected. I’ve got beans. I’m going to filet them and stuff them with cheese and spinach. The whole fleet.
We didn’t have a vegetable garden until about 10 years ago. Paul was laid off while renovations were taking place where he worked. It was supposed to be a couple months. Turned into 9. He knocked out all the projects he was going to do the first month. Got bored and started looking for “busy work”: stuff that didn’t need to be done, but he doesn’t handle boredom well. So he decided on a vegetable garden. We didn’t have a place for one as we have lots of trees. The only sunny location is our driveway. So he built two raised beds, one of them is also a cold-frame where I can over-winter my herbs. We were inundated with tomatoes and jalapeños. Fortuitously, at a yard sale that summer, I found a pressure canner and some canning books. Bought some canning supplies, and put up so many quarts of tomatoes and pickled so many hot peppers that we had enough in our basement to last until the following growing season.
And i agree about tomatoes; I won’t even buy supermarket tomatoes. I usually call them notional tomatoes, but I like your analogy to being created by a 3D printer!
During the summer, I make lots of Caprese salads, and eat lots of tomato sandwiches slathered with mayo. This is the best part of summer: the produce.
OMG… Murr! I was listening to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me this morning, and at the very end of the show, Roy Blount Jr. said the word “flang.” It’s taking, off, baby! it’s taking off!
Looked it up. This is one definition of flang: noun A Scotch and obsolete English preterit of fling .
I really didn’t think I made it up and suspected I scooped it from Pogo, but I don’t know!
Now that I look at it, how could it be a noun? Did they try to noun a verb?
Ah, flang is just a wonderful word. Saying it makes me want to go outside and whip things across the yard with abandon.
Whip it. Whip it good.
I grew up with huge vegetable gardens and was sent out to weed, pick and bring them in for Mom to freeze in Tupperware containers. There were occasional visits from hornworms, but not so many as to be considered hazards.
My brother did his undergraduate studies at Rutgers and brought home special tomato plants and cherry tomato plants. He cut down dead cedar trees and set them up as stakes. We ended up with cherry tomato plants that were twenty feet tall and fruit that we were giving away because there was no way that six people could eat them all. For some reason Mom never made sauce.
We also grew cucumbers and squash and always would find hiders that were the size of baseball bats.
We grew corn once. Only once. About the time the corn was big enough to pick, the squirrels picked it. Early one Sunday morning I heard a ripping sound. I looked out the window in time to see a squirrel jump out of tree, grab onto an ear of corn as it fell and rip it off on the way down to the ground.
My brother and I ran out to stop them and the squirrels just uprooted the remaining plants and carried them up into the treetops.
My maternal grandfather got tomato plants during WWII. He grew up in a city in Scotland, so had no notion of how to grow anything. He read up on it and discovered he needed stakes. He went to the dump and came back with old Christmas trees and set them up as stakes. It became known as Haddows’ Dead Tree Farm… until the tomatoes started coming in. He fed his neighborhood.
The only vegetable growing I’ve done has been in the form of volunteers and one or two tomato plants donated by my dad. I’ve grown potatoes in my compost pile from potato peelings and tomato plants that came as seeds in bags of MiracleGro.
We get “volunteers” as well from our compost pile. We always leave enough room for them. This year we have a couple volunteer tomato plants, a squash (don’t know what kind), and a pepper plant (again, he remains anonymous. Sweet? Hot? Dunno.)
No volunteers for me this year. There was no new MiracleGro and I wasn’t outside much due to Canadian smoke and asthma.
It was startling to see Margaret with a shotgun next to her kitchen window. We have never been an armed family. But boy oh boy. “You wanna know exactly when the corn is ripe? I’ll tell you when the corn is ripe. The corn is ripe the day the raccoons make off with it in the middle of the night.”
I now have a lovely vision of Margaret flanging hornworms.
Fling. Flang. Have flung.
Thank you for conjugating our new favorite verb!
Living in Montana for the last 25 years pretty much stopped my gardening. In Butte the growing season was around 45 days. Lettuce, if you were careful, radishes and green onions.
Previously, in the 70’s we lived in Boring, where we had a largish garden with corn, the usual greens and peppers. Quite abundant, as I remember.
In Grants pass we relied on well water, so by Aug watering the 15X40 foot garden was a problem. Cary had a large plot of beans…pinto beans, which dried on the vine, and we had pounds of good dry pinto beans.
In Alaska, we had raspberries, which did astonishingly well. Berry’s galore from a 5X10 foot plot. Same with zuc’s…by August the neighbors wouldn’t answer the door for us.
Now…it’s New Seasons or the ilk.
My dad had a terrific vegetable garden in Bozeman. I, by the way, have yet to plant a zucchini. I like success as much as the next person but not that much.
I’ve done that thing, the harvest reluctance, and it’s weird. I’ve watched okra grow too tough to eat; Japanese eggplant sprawled blowsily in the dirt as it prepared to decompose; broccoli bolt to bitterness; melons grow flattened on one side and too mealy to eat. Like you, I think I’m shocked by success. And I’m not always ready to cook the plants when they need to be eaten. And there’s some odd squeamishness about eating a vegetable careless enough to be grown by a such dilettante gardener. They lack self respect somehow.
I won’t eat a vegetable if it’s too big. They are tough and not as tasty as “baby vegetables.” Even at produce stands, if they are honkin’ squash or eggplants… I’ll pass.
We ate everything. And a lot of it was terrible. Mom found a recipe that made baseball bat sized zucchini tasty. But I think even sawdust would be edible if minced fine, mixed with milk, bread crumbs, cheese and eggs and then baked in a shell.
Does not apply to asparagus though. People pick up the skinny ones at the store thinking they’re “baby” but they’re not. I like ’em fat.
I will hereby also state that although many people have insisted broccoli fresh picked is superior to any other broccoli, I have found it’s all the same. I like it though.
We’ve had a bumper crop of tomatoes up here in Canada where Bruce’s smoke comes from. Just when I thought we were making some progress on the big bowl of red, yellow and green striped beauties in the fridge, the next door neighbour knocks on the door with a bag of…tomatoes! Luckily, there were cukes and peppers too so I could make Greek salad for 10. Agreed–store tomatoes are tasteless. I buy Roma, which at least are not mushy. There’s a good song about home grown tomatoes.
Here’s a mystery for you Murr: your posts always come to my email at 9 PM. So, here I am posting about an hour later and there are already 15 posts, with responses as early as 8:30 AM Pacific time. Do your posts get pulled over at the US/Can border and sniffed by the dogs before they let them into the Great White North? If this were mail, then I’d just blame it on Canada Post (like we always do). Maybe the beavers that run the treadmill generator for our igloo just aren’t running fast enough. I’m baffled.
Yes Will–all my posts get sniffed by dogs and sometimes peed on.
I post all my stuff at 3am my time Wednesdays and Saturdays. The email notification service–which I’m not real happy with, actually–sends off emails at the same time of day you originally signed up for them. Apparently. Mine come in the evening also. But of course you can bookmark the page and see it anytime you want.
That’s what I do. I figure that I’m looking at the comments of others anyway, so why sign up for e-mail when I can just bookmark it. I love your blog, because there are so many intelligent people commenting, as opposed to most social media.
To be fair, there are goofballs among us as well.
Beans the size of canoes! hilarious. I have successfully grown various vegetables and herbs in four gardens I’ve lived in but here nothing stands a chance against crawling, slithering and flying critters and the possums. Anything daring to send up a shoot or even manages a few leaves, gets eaten to the ground over night. I’ve given up.
Well I think I would give up too. Here people have tall fences against the deer but it sounds like you have too many hungry critters.
“It is a thrill to possess shelves well stocked with home canned food. In fact, you will find their inspection — often surreptitious — and the pleasure of serving the fruits of your labor comparable only to a clear conscience, or a very becoming hat.”
The Joy of Cooking, my 1978 edition
Fantastic!
PS You should see some of the things in my mother-in-law’s 1942 edition.
Unfortunately I don’t recall the details (I ought to make some up), but my mom, when young, and some others, were in a house when they heard loud bangs from the basement. The home-canned-tomato jars were exploding.
Hornworms–ugliest things ever. I was waiting for our tomatoes to get just a little bit riper and then discovered one on the ground with a bite taken out of it. Damn squirrels. Picked any tomato with some color on it and put them on my counter. Not going to let those rodents win!
I think they’re kind of cute and squishy. Hornworms. Squirrels on the other hand…they like to take a bite or two out of each squash. The tomatoes they also like, but I grow more of them than they will eat.
Last year, Paul picked tomatoes when they were just blushing, to thwart squirrels and birds. They ripened and were good. This year, I told him, “Hey! Squirrels have maybe a 2 year life span at best. Outdoor birds aren’t known for their life spans either. Let them be until they ripen.” We did that this year. They taste MUCH better.
I too have seen many of my tomatoes chewed up this year, more than ever before. But I never catch a critter in the act, so I don’t know if it’s raccoons (a week ago I turned on the light at night and saw FIVE young ones playing in the sprinkler spray) or skunks or possums or squirrels or birds or whatever. No hornworms this year (the alyssum is working again!), so it’s not them. Wrapping two of the five plants with netting halfway through the season did not make much difference. Next year, gauze. I wonder if coyotes eat tomatoes?
They put them in their Catchatore sauce.
Catch a what?
Cat. Chatore.
Probably squirrels. We had a problem for 2 years. But squirrels have a short life span. And we HATE when young raccoons go into our fish pond. We don’t mind if they eat our fish… but they just eat bits of them and leave the rest. We love our fish. If you are NOT eating them, then GO AWAY!
We recently added mosquito fish to our fishpond and they are truly adorable. Tiny little cuties.
We’ve always had squirrels, but they never gnawed on tomatoes before. I just looked at a list of tomato pests, and I’m guessing cutworms, which only come out at night.
I’m Scottish and we definitely don’t say “flang”. However, well done for your veg growing. I myself like eating veg – indeed am vegetarian – but don’t like them enough to sacrifice flower space in my little Scottish garden for them.