We’re in the bounty time of year, and our supper table is loaded with beans and cabbages, summer squash and cucumbers, new potatoes and corn, fresh tomato and basil salad, onions and beets.
You know what that means. Winter is coming.
The red squirrels and chipmunks know it. They are busy, all the still-long days, preparing. They’re swiping chicken feed and bird seed, stealing the seeds of the past-prime cucumbers and squashes that we’ve dumped for the chickens to peck through, helping themselves to the winter rye seed.
Their method of preparing for winter seems a little suspect to me. They leave little piles of corn in the flower garden, and hide seeds on the exhaust manifold of the car and truck, which doesn’t seem like really good planning. It’s kind of like the winter mice, who move into the house, steal food from the dog dishes and stash it in the kids’ boots.
Of course, the squirrels and their friends might think my method of winter prep is also suspect. I mean, how much lime marmalade does one family really need? I don’t know. But a bag of organic limes showed up in the house, in a box of old bread and older pears someone dropped off for the chickens, and I was not about to waste a bag of organic limes. So I made marmalade. And any squirrel knows you can’t live on marmalade.
That’s why our house is starting to look like we are preparing for disaster. There are boxes of tomatoes on a side table, ready to be made into paste and sauce and salsa. There’s a big metal bowl of little cucumbers, soaking in salt water, to be made into pickles. There’s half a bushel of beans in the fridge, waiting to be put into the freezer, or pickled with dill and garlic.
We’re not expecting the end of the world. Just winter.
“Do you think you should pick up a bushel of corn from the farm stand?” my husband asked last week.
“But,” I said, “but . . .” We’d just finished the early corn, and we’re about a week away from the middle corn. The late corn is just tasseling. “There’s corn coming,” I said.
“Well,” he said. “You never know. And it’s going to be cold next week.”
He’s from Florida, of course, so to him, winter is the end of the world. But he’s right about the corn. Because where we live, we could get frost around Labor Day. Which, apparently, is coming right up. And there’s not more than four or five quarts of corn in the freezer. And winter is very long.
Some people worry about the bounty of the season — too many zucchini, too many green beans. My friends from Connecticut complained about getting yet another bag of kale from their farm-share. “We’re running out of ways to eat it,” they said.
Chop it up and freeze it, I told them. “In the winter you’ll be happy to have the taste of summer. And the vitamins.”
Summer is short around here. The growing season starts late, the warmth builds so slowly you think nothing will ever grow. Then it explodes, and it’s August, and the sunflowers are towering over the corn, the pumpkins are vining over the tomatoes, the lettuce is bolting and going to seed.
Those tomatoes you thought would never get ripe are marching into the house by the bushel, and in a spot of the garden you have no recollection of planting there are pattypan and delicata squashes, some gray pumpkins, and the prettiest little winged gourds. Quick! They all have to come in before frost!
It’s staying dark later in the morning, and if you’re out at 5 a.m. you’ll spot Orion, lying on his side in the eastern sky, which is a much as sign of fall as the pumpkins turning orange or the bean vines dying off. Or the kids getting ready for school.
I try not to be sad about summer ending. Unlike my husband, I trust it will return again.
Until then, the best way I know to preserve it is in the freezer and in jars of fruits and vegetables, labeled “August.”
Margaret Hartley is the Gazette’s Sunday and features editor. Greenpoint appears in the Gazette’s print edition Sundays on the Environment page.
Have a question or a topic you’d like addressed on Greenpoint? Email greenpoint@dailygazette.net.
