Harvest

Die-Hard Gardener

Like a benevolent Garden Goddess, I find myself bestowing—OK, forcing a blessing of fruit or vegetables upon all who visit my home. It actually started early in July. Rejoicing over the first of the harvest, I was eager to share my abundance. “Here, please take a container of raspberries home with you,” I would say as I magnanimously held out an offering to my visitors. Then the plums started dropping in generous quantities from the tree. Ripe and ready to eat or preserve, they would not wait. I made plum sauce, plum muffins, plum bread, plum turnovers, and we had fresh plums for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “Just a minute”, I would call to my unsuspecting visitors as they were leaving, “You will want to take some of these plums home with you.” Undoubtedly touched by my generosity, they would happily leave my door, clutching their sacks of plums. Then…

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Worm Holes

I was standing on top of the ladder trying to push aside my disappointment along with the heavily laden branches of my apple tree. “What a shame—so many worm holes this year,” I grumbled as I examined the almost-beautiful apple cupped in my hand. About four out of five apples I picked had at least one worm hole. We had been too busy to keep up the spraying this year and now we were reaping the results. Even though sorely neglected, the apples had filled out well because of the perfect timing of the extra rain and strong winds we had at blossom and small fruit time. The result had been a thorough job of thinning! I hadn’t had time to start picking the apples until after our first frost, but that in itself was inadvertently adhering to my Grandma Smith’s advice of letting the first frost “set the sugar”…

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