Harvest

Garden vegetables get smaller as the hours of sunlight diminish now. You know how the girth of August tomatoes is much less, maybe half, of July's. These August jalapenos, small but fully formed, easily detached from the mother plant, and that meant, "Harvest Me." These little emerald beauties are hot as #&!*@!!#. I can never predict how hot a homegrown hot pepper will be.

The word "harvest" comes from Anglo-Saxon and is related to the German "Herbst," meaning "autumn." I am not ready for autumn but harvest is fine by me. It's also guaranteed in one of the most beautiful sentences in the English language: "While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease."

Everybody Loves Confusion

The light green hose is older and made of tough rubber that's gotten a bit stiff. It was in the garage when I moved here and nothing is wrong with it, except the car ran over and warped the brass coupling where it attaches to the dark green hose, and after that these hoses couldn't be separated.

Which was bad news, because the dark green hose, bought during hard times, is plastic, cheap and after a year developed semi-permanent kinks.

Last night I tried coiling it. I wrestled it. I pulled it to its full 30-foot length, took the twists out, and tried again. Tried to pinch the kinks open. Tried standing on the kinks to pinch them open. Then tried to coil it. It turned into knots, and kinked again -- Photo shows the best coil I could get. After struggling for an hour, it suddenly hit me: Throw this out. Buy a new one. And don't buy a cheapie!

Keep Those Home Fries Burning

Salivate over the potato-and-egg salad that could be made outa these, or red-potato home fries that will make your friends get up and kiss you without even takin off the napkin from around their necks.

Delighted to see fresh produce, including zucchini, now available from a place not far from here that's a cross between a garden and a farm field, and bought these little gems -- averaging about ping-pong ball size -- for their blushing beauty and of course to think of a hundred decadent ways to cook them.

Demetrius grew these in his garden. Potatoes are mysterious and I had no idea when they'd be ready to dig, but he knew, and I helped him harvest his little red edible gems that began their growth in clusters, kind of like grapes underground. While spading them up you can't help but scar some of them, but I was so bewitched that I turned every inch of earth around there to get 'em all, backache or no backache. This year at the "honor" vegetable stand (where you leave your money on a table next to the road) these were 2 lbs for $2.

Which Twin Has the Toni?

OK -- raking an acre of "lawn" -- if you can call clumps of weeds, cedar-tree sprouts, and mole holes a lawn -- is a big job -- especially because I didn't do it last year. Raking the the leaves (oak and hickory) into a pile, I then very cleverly sweep them onto an old shower curtain and drag the curtain to a place I can dump the leaves . . . smart. . . brains. . . no dumb bunny.

Jelly-Bellied Friends Part 2

To kill slugs in your garden, put out a pan of beer. Slugs are not churchgoers, so even on Sundays they will belly up to the rim, drink, and die. Told that to a friend who remembered a steamy Sunday in 1954 when his beer-drunk uncle fell into the thorn bushes, had a heart attack, and died. I said, “Gross.” He said, No, it was the way everybody should go, doin’ what they liked.

Giddy-up, Snapper!

With this photo I will surely win the title of Miss Lawn Mower 2009 of Pacific, MO, hands down, no contest. Steve the handyman, and the new handyman, Tim, were out here this morning and taught me to use the riding mower and were game to take my photo. This was my first ride on a mower. To my surprise it is fun. I'm also surprisingly attractive. Who knows what's next, an ATV?

Demetrius the Gardener: 1948-2009

A brilliant and strictly principled organic gardener, Demetrius was talented with all plants and devoted to vegetables. He dug a pit 25 feet by 25 out of hard clay and filled it with soil and it became his garden. He grew exquisite tomatoes, beans, zucchini, Charentais cantaloupes, pattypan squash, lettuces, and red potatoes; also onions, garlic, turnips and -- pictured, he's harvesting -- kale. Fresh kale grew deep into the the winter in the hotbeds he built. When he saw his first tomato seedlings every April, you would have thought he was a new father admiring his babies.

Demetrius used to lecture and chide the bunnies who were calmly and in plain sight chomping on his vegetables. The bunnies didn't listen, although he had important stuff to say. So he planted white clover between the vegetable rows, and it worked; the bunnies ate the clover and left the rest alone. But we never did figure out how to keep the turtles from eating the cantaloupes. He loved the seasons and solstices and bees and cycles of life and often remarked on the natural world: "The design is perfect."

He always tried to get a position as a gardener but his true love was farming. The tomatoes on the plate I'm holding in my own photo are the fruits of his labor. Goodbye, friend since 1997; a difficult and sometimes tortured man, Demetrius. He took that name because it means "priest of Demeter" and a gardener is a priest of the earth.

Free Chives

Longing for the sight and taste of greenery this time of year, I am always delighted by the chive patches appearing in the lower, wetter parts of the woods during January thaw. Go find some. Use scissors to clip 'em and scissor them over your squash soup, potato soup, or carrots; sprinkle 'em over your omelets; chew on 'em and blow onion breath to gross-out your best friend, dig up a clump to plant in the herb garden. Keep clipping and using your chives or the plant overgrows and gets grassy.

The First Tomato and the Flag Man

With awe I watched the hard little green pearls of May turn into the fat green beads of early June. Then one of them grew fat and soft, took on a lemony tinge, and then a red. And here it is. Gem of all gems. Summer's first tomato.

This is better than an award, better than a military decoration. It's beautiful, shiny, and fit. God, who is an artist, packaged this little, special gift of food. Not only is it wonderfully colored and crafted -- it will taste good and nourish the body. Great work, God! (Applause.) And, God, I'm sorry I've been tied up in the rush and details of life and not seeing the depths and wonders of your creations.

When I'm sitting in traffic waiting for a flagman to direct the rush hour around road construction, I like to remind myself that the flagman, who stands in hot sunlight on hot asphalt and deals all day with irritable and inconsiderate drivers -- is one of God's wonderful creations, is doing God's work of caring for us regardless of who we are, and that someone loves him very much.

Stealth Gardening

A secret: From last year onward, I'm not supposed to plant vegetables or herbs. The landlord wants to keep his 100 acres totally natural. So this year the poison ivy grows wild, and my tomatoes and basil are in containers. But I'm darned if crops from last year aren't resurrecting and growing exactly where they please:

-echinaceas
-turnips and garlic in the compost pile
-parsley
-dill, in the same place I tore it up last fall
-lavender, ditto
-fennel, ditto
-arugula (very, very tall this year)

And I have all of this without dirtying my hands, absolutely free! What luck! Thanks, Mr. Landlord!

Plantin'

Working way too hard to dig six inches down so I could break up the dry soil and plant some bulbs, my face throbbed and I started to feel lightheaded. So I put the shovel down and stood right in the garden plot, thinking I might die of a heart attack right then and there.

That's exactly how my father died, at age 63. Digging in his garden on a fall morning he pitched face forward onto the earth, and a neighbor found him. That was 25 years ago. I'm not as old, and I don't smoke like he did, but I'm know that I'm not too young to get that phone call from God. When he calls, there's no choice but to go.

I waited for my heart to stop beating so hard. It didn't. I thought, "Well, it's better to die outside the house than inside; my neighbor will come home from work at 3:30 or so, so I won't by lying here too much more than six hours. And it's better to die fast than slow; they say it takes about 90 seconds; hope it doesn't hurt too much. . ."

False alarm. I took it very easy after that, planting my crocus bulbs and three small perennials called -- what? Campanula. Bellflowers. Blue. Now I know one thing for sure: They'll be here in the springtime whether I am here or not.