We Thought You'd Marry One

Remember a few months ago I wrote about planting our first garden? We honestly didn't have much hope for it. The soil was rocky and clumpy having spent years trapped under blacktop.  And of course, neither of us knew a thing about gardening. We tossed in a few bags of steer manure and decided to let nature take it's course.

Well as it turns out, Mother Nature is a tough old broad. We had an amazing crop.

We also learned some lessons: plant the tomatoes a bit further apart from one another; pumpkins will overtake everything in their path like The Blob; and Sweet Baby Jesus 5 zucchini plants are 4 too many! I gave them away to friends. I gave them away to neighbors. If a kid made the mistake of coming to our place to play, he left with zucchini.

And with a bumper crop comes the question of what to do with it all. One moment you're delighted to have harvested 50 tomatoes, and the next you're trying to figure out what to do with 50 tomatoes. Well, I am my yia yia's boy: so following in her footsteps, I canned mine - even using her (now vintage) grinder.

I even shucked our sunflowers!

Years ago, after hearing that for Thanksgiving I had let bread go stale for our homemade stuffing and that I backed a fresh pumpkin for the pie, my brother John said, "Gee, Chris, we always figured you'd grow up to marry a nice Mormon girl, not become one!"  Hmmm, maybe there's something to that...