All the Ingredients

Harvest Time: Dehydrated Watermelon

The winter I was pregnant with my son Zach, I craved watermelon in January. Supermarkets in Iowa don't even have watermelon grown in Tahiti in the winter. My poor husband, who valiantly went to the store to try and ease this craving, came home with watermelon Jolly Ranchers. They were good, but not what I wanted. In the middle of cold, snowy Januaries, I often crave the flavors of summer. I want fresh tomato sauce made with herbs from my garden. I want peaches and sweet corn and watermelon. After a number of years of putting by the harvest from my own garden, I have learned to make and freeze my own tomato sauce with my garden's herbs. Poured over pasta, summer comes alive in my mouth. Corn, blanched on the cob and frozen off of it, is heated with a little butter and salt for picnic table flavor while it snows outside. Peach pie, baked in June, tastes like summer in the February doldrums. But watermelon? You can't can it, or bake it, or freeze it with much success.

But then I got the crazy idea to dehydrate it.

I have an inexpensive food dehydrator that I bought at Biggie Mart--it came complete with directions and spices for making jerky, not something I have any interest in making. I wanted another way to put by the products from my garden.

I started with tomato slices. I like snipping dried slices into meatloaves and burger patties to add an extra zing of flavor. I start to panic this time of year--the first frost is on the horizon, but I have oodles of herbs still fresh and green in the garden. Into the dryer they go. All four trays of sage. Then all basil. Oregano. Lavender. The house smells alternately of Italy or potpourri. I tried peach slices--good, but they lose their crisp color, turning a bit brown. I had great success with ginger. I grind the dried slices to add to baked goods, or throw a few pieces in a pot of tea.

And then, last summer, I tried watermelon.

I bought a seedless one at a local fruit stand (a pick-up truck with a wooden roof over it manned by a teenage girl in a tank top and shorts who had picked the corn and melons herself that morning), and cut it up into fairly uniform slices about 3/4 of an inch thick. I laid them out close together on the four racks of my dehydrator, and let it run on the highest temperature for about 24 hours--or until the pieces no longer felt gummy to the touch.  About 85-90 percent of the slices are water, and I was left with crispy watermelon chips. Then I vacuum-sealed them and put them away until January.

Some reviews I have read say that dehydrated watermelon tastes only slightly like watermelon. That has not been my experience. I think that taking the water out of the fruit intensifies the flavor. The last watermelon I dehydrated this growing season was not a particularly sweet fruit, but the dried pieces were almost as good as fruit I had processed at the peak of the season. The only problem I have is rationing it out. Once I eat a piece of the crunchy fruit, I want it all. This year's pouches are hidden away in the cupboard, where I won't find them until the picnic table is buried under a foot of snow.

I can hardly wait!

Strawberry Shortcake on the Griddle

Last summer I planted 12 strawberry plants. They settled in, sent out runners, and produced a small crop of berries--enough for eating out of hand. This summer they spread more and are happily producing many more berries.

When I went out to pick the first few ripe berries, I discovered that they had already been nibbled on. I suspect the culprit was Volkswagen, our neighborhood raccoon. We have spotted him a number of times eating the rabbit corn and bird seed we had been putting out all winter for the birds. I call him Volkswagen because in silhouette, he resembles the VW Beetle, and because he is the largest raccoon I have ever seen. Although raccoons are supposed to be nocturnal, Volkswagen is not. He prefers to come out late in the afternoon to see what's about the house to eat. He is probably so large because this gives him a dining advantage over his nocturnal friends. So I laid tomato cages on their sides to form a protective framework over the berry patch, and covered it with netting. Volkswagen can no longer get to the berries, and yesterday I picked a bowlful.

It's wonderful to eat fresh strawberries, warm from the sun. It's also good to eat them as strawberry shortcake. There is just one problem with making shortcake in my kitchen right now. The oven is broken. It had been heating slowly, so we ran a cleaning cycle. That heated the oven up hot enough and long enough to incinerate any oven goo that might have been causing it not to heat well. It also burned out the something-or-other so that the oven will heat up no higher than 190 degrees.

This is a problem. There are no recipes for shortcake that will cook at that temperature. Beef jerky, yes, shortcake, no. So I decided that my best option, short of building a solar oven, was to make shortcakes as griddle cakes. I started with a plain shortcake recipe, adapting one of Paula Deen's. I wanted a full-fat recipe so that the cakes wouldn't stick to the griddle. I also wanted a shortcake dough that I had to roll out so that it would be thin enough to cook on a griddle.

• 2 cups flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 stick butter, cold and cubed
• 2/3 cup half-and-half

In the bowl of a food processor, pulse together the flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and butter until you have a coarse meal. Put the mixture into a large bowl, and form well in the center. Add the half-and-half. Gently mix with a spatula until the dough just comes together. Turn it out onto a lightly flowered surface, and shape into a disk that is 3/4 of an inch thick. In the original recipe, you cut this into 8 3-inch round biscuits and bake in a 400 degree oven for 12-15 minutes until the biscuits are fluffy and golden.    

Instead I rolled them out to about 1/2 inch thick, getting 18 shortcakes. Even though my mother taught me not to, I always gently squish together the lacey bits leftover from cutting out the shortcakes (or biscuits). I can never bear to waste any of the wonderful buttery dough. That gives me two or three ugly lumpy shortcakes that I always think taste the best. 

I heated up the griddle on low, and put the shortcakes together on top so that they would fit, seven under a pot lid. I figured the heat under the lid would create a heated space and allow the shortcakes to rise a bit. It worked!

I flipped each shortcake over four times to evenly distribute their time on the griddle surface. It took each batch of biscuits about 12-15 minutes minutes to cook all the way through. I could tell when they were done when they were golden brown and firm along the edges. To serve, I put one shortcake on a plate and topped it with garden strawberries and real whipped cream, and then layered it with another shortcake, berries, and more whipped cream. They were heavenly!

So head out to your garden and pick your strawberries, or find your closest farmer's market. All sorts of berries are in season now, and will taste great as shortcake. The berries are waiting for you! 

Final Harvests

It is 36 degrees outside and snowing puffy flakes that won't stick. The tomato plants have all turned brown and flopped over. The giant shrub of parsley has finally succumbed to the cold and deflated into a flat circle in the flower bed. It's the third week of November and the last tomato was just picked ten days ago. The weather has gone from end of summer to winter with not much autumn in between.

But for the last two weeks I have been harvesting and putting up the end of the garden produce. I have dried countless batches of oregano, parsley, lavender, sage, and basil in the food dehydrator. I harvested twenty small to medium onions that are hanging in the basement, and dried several batches of leeks diced into small pieces. I also slit, seeded and dried eight jalapeno peppers--the crop was much larger than that but we ate a lot of them in salsas. I made many batches of tomato sauce for the freezer.

I harvested roughly two dozen stumpy carrots. They were on the side of the garden not washed out by the summer's flood, but still they seemed to suffer from stunted growth. I am enjoying them, but they taste a little too much like dirt for the rest of the family. They will be finished off as the Thanksgiving carrot salad next week.

And then there were the sweet potatoes.

I have never grown sweet potatoes before. I found the plants--a dozen for $2.27 at the hardware store greenhouse--and thought I would give them a try. I love sweet potatoes. I dug a bed for them, and spaced the plants out with about eight inches in between them. They grew. And they grew. Like last summers pumpkins, the vines spread out and tried to take over. But the potatoes were growing underground, and the vines were easily trimmed back with the mower when they encroached too far on the lawn, so they were not too invasive. They grew into the arbor vita shrubs behind the bed where they were planted and out the other side. When I finally pulled the vines up, some of them were more than twelve feet long.

I had put black plastic down around all my plants, with grass clippings over the top to keep it down. When I pulled up the vines and then the plastic, the potatoes were hiding just under the surface around the main stem into the ground. Each vine produced three to four potatoes. BIG potatoes. I gave some away and wrapped the rest in newspaper and put in the basement. They will be baked in the oven and mashed. I add a little butter and ginger and freeze them in one-cup containers. We will have mashed sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving, as well as sweet potato rolls.

For these I use a potato bread recipe out of Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads, and substitute mashed sweet potatoes for the mashed white potatoes the recipe calls for. This was done one Thanksgiving several years ago when I realized that I only had enough white potatoes to mash for dinner, and not enough to use for the rolls. I thawed some mashed sweet potatoes from the freezer and made the dough using those. Everyone raved about the rolls that year, and I have made them that way ever since. Last year my son walked through the kitchen and caught me mixing up the dough with the mashed sweet potatoes. He doesn't like them, and said that I was ruining the rolls and he wouldn't eat any at dinner. He ate nine. 

There is still a basket of Roma tomatoes on the table ranging from green to almost overripe. We are slicing them on pizza, adding them to salads, and trying to use them all up. There are many containers of tomato sauce in the freezer, onions, sweet potatoes, frozen packs of rhubarb and our first small strawberries, and lots of dried herbs waiting to be used as seasonings all winter--the dried sage will go nicely in the cornbread stuffing for the turkey. In spite of the flood and all the rain that took out the beans, cucumbers, and the beets, it was a good year for the garden. We will have a lot to be Thankful for next Thursday.

Retro Dutch Apple Pie

Recently I was working my way through a lug of Colorado peaches by making a number of peach pies for the freezer. (Warm peach pie tastes great in front of the fire on a cold Iowa January day.) I found myself left with only enough pie dough for a bottom crust. I had a lovely bowlful of Cortland Apples that I had gotten at the farmers market, and decided to make my mom's Dutch Apple Pie. It has a crumb topping and only needs dough for the bottom crust.

I rolled out the dough while the oven preheated to 425 degrees, and peeled and sliced nine small to medium apples.I had never tried Cortlands before this fall. They are grown at the local Honey Creek Acres, and were recommended to me by the lady who sold them at the market as her "new favorite eating apple." The fruit of these apples is pure white, with a nice crunchy texture that doesn't break down in a pie. I had made applesauce of the first batch I had bought, cooking the apples with the red skins still on. They produced the most lovely pink applesauce.

Following my mother's recipe, to the sliced apples I added:

• 1/4 C sugar (the recipe calls for 1/2 C, but these apples don't need a lot of extra sugar)

• 1/2 t nutmeg

• 1 t cinnamon

• 2 1/2 T lemon juice

• 2 T flour

Once I had mixed all the ingredients, I heaped the coated apple slices into the pie shell. Then I mixed up the crumb topping (what my mother's recipe called the "Dutch part" of the pie). It consisted of:

• 1/2 C flour

• 1/2 C sugar

• 1 stick butter, at room temperature

Mix the flour and sugar, and cut it into the butter to make thick crumbs. Then place the crumbs evenly over the apples in the crust. (It was very warm in my kitchen and the crumbs were a bit gooey.)

Then (and this is the really weird part of this recipe) you slide the pie into a clean brown grocery bag, being careful that the pie pan is in the center of the bag and not touching the sides. Staple the bag closed, place it on a cookie sheet, and slide the pie-in-bag onto a rack in the oven that has been lowered enough so that the top of the brown grocery bag doesn't touch the top of the oven. Bake the pie one hour.

Now when the pie first starts to bake, your kitchen will smell like baking grocery sack, and you will be sure the entire bag is going to burst into flames in such a hot oven. Mine never has. And after about ten minutes, the smell goes away.

After baking the pie for an hour, slide the pie--still in the bag--onto a rack to cool. When you can easily handle the pie (but it's still a little warm), take it out of the bag and enjoy a slice with some vanilla ice cream on top.

I don't usually make pies with this much butter and sugar anymore. I like to taste the fruit without much more than crust, but we enjoyed this apple pie a lot. My mother didn't bake a lot of pies (that was my area of expertise), but we always had fun with this recipe. It also works well with peaches or strawberries. You just want enough fruit to mound into the pie pan, so that when it cooks down, it's a good ratio to this sweet topping.

 

Tomato Sauce

Well, it doesn't look like I will get much corn out of our garden. Someone (a raccoon perhaps?) has been systematically pulling the ears off the stalks--even the baby, half-formed ones--and eating them. I go out every morning to find the cobs, husks pulled back, cleaned of kernels. But whoever is dining on my corn doesn't like tomatoes.

I picked approximately two batches of a hundred each last week, mostly the Romas, but also some of the yellow and pinks (can't find the plastic name tag under the vines), and the Big Boys. To make my basic sauce, I cleaned and chopped the tomatoes in halves or quarters, depending on their size, and threw them in a pot with chopped up zucchini and onions. The first zucchini I picked were the large ones, so it only took one per pot. I think that the onions and the zucchini round out the flavor of the tomatoes, and give the finished sauce a smoother texture.

I cooked this mixture until all the vegetables were soft, and then ran it through it through what is now called a "vintage" food mill--an aluminum cone in a stand with a wooden pestle. I bought this one at the hardware store the first time I ever made cranberry sauce after I moved to Iowa because it's the kind my mother used. Now food mills have flat bottoms and handles that spin the food through. The sauce at this point was very thin. I added fresh basil leaves and a stalk of oregano from the garden and simmered the sauce for more than an hour. Then I scooped out the herbs, added a bit of salt and red wine.

At this point, the sauce is just the right consistency for tomato soup. I ladled some out to take to work to eat that way. It is great soup with a little cream and some croutons added. I personally prefer mine with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole grain bread for dunking. Then I put the pot back on the burner and continued to simmer it under the sauce in the pot is reduced by about half. I could can the sauce at this point, but not having a lot of time, I packaged it in different size containers for spaghetti sauce or homemade pizza, and froze it.

I hope to have enough tomatoes to make two more batches next week. Nothing is quite as heartening in the Iowa winter deep freeze as the taste of that fresh tomato sauce.

Garden Salsa

The first tomatoes are finally ready in the garden. I also have onions and herbs, so I decided to make salsa.

Now, I spent most of my precollege years in Phoenix. This was back in the days before salsa became trendy and was made out of mangoes or pineapple or peaches. I am stodgy when it comes to salsa. I want a tomatoes base. To me, the other concoctions are fruit relishes.

I also am not a big fan of chunks of onion or large fronds of cilantro. I could be wrong, but I don't think cilantro was a common salsa ingredient in Phoenix in the 1960s. It certainly wasn't an herb my mother ever used, and she was a pretty adventurous cook. So yesterday, with fresh ingredients from my garden, and within my picky parameters, I came up with a frisky salsa.

First I sliced up a sweet yellow onion. I hadn't planned to harvest most of the onions this early, but more than a dozen of them had pushed themselves halfway out of the soil. Obviously, I need to plant them deeper next summer. So now I have a nice braid of drying, lemon-sized onions.

I added a diced clove of garlic to the onion and sauteed them in olive oil until just soft. In the food processor, I combined chunks of yellow and red tomatoes from the garden, along with some parsley and cilantro. After several pulses, I added the onions, garlic, and some sea salt. Then I diced up and threw in the first jalapeno from the garden. I am new to enjoying spicy heat in my food. I know that many people don't consider jalapenoss to be very hot, but the salsa had quite a lot of zip for me. And the onion and garlic flavors were there but muted. A new family favorite recipe!

Sweet Corn

There are pluses and minuses to living in Iowa. In the last six months, we've had too many minuses. We had a long and awful winter with too much snow and ice. At one point, most of the folks in our area were without electricity for three days, the result of a nasty ice storm. We bought a house with a fireplace so we would have someplace to hang the Christmas stockings and have been grateful for it every winter. A wet spring led into what will now be recorded in our memories and the history books as "The Flood of 2008." We bought a house on a hill because it came with an acre and a half of land. It also happens to be far enough from the lake that surrounds our rural subdivision on three sides, to never be in danger of flooding. Recovery in our part of Iowa will be very slow. Favorite restaurants are gone and won't return. Other businesses have relocated. And many people were washed completely out of their homes, neighborhoods, and towns, and have to start over again.

A lot of people lost their gardens. I was lucky. I only lost my beans which came up and rotted in the wet soil. I replanted, just to have it happen again. A lot of farmers in this area lost all or part of their corn fields. Even now, there's been enough rain that some of these fields remain shallow lakes. I drove by one adjacent to the interstate recently that had a fallen tree along one edge that was covered in snowy egrets. Perhaps they thought they had gotten to Minnesota, the land of a thousand lakes, a little sooner this summer. It was consoling to think that such beautiful birds have stopped to rest in a spot that's beauty this time of year should have come from tall green corn sporting a crown of tassels.

I have my own small strip of corn in my garden this year. I haven't planted corn in over a decade because we live on the top of a hill, and the tall corn plants are vulnerable to the strong rains and hail storms of the average Iowa summer. My small crops were always broken down before they could produce anything. Since I have my garden in our protected side yard this summer, I thought I would give corn another try. Due to the wet spring, the plants emerged at different times and are at different heights, like two blended families with lots of children. So far we have four ears of corn developing. If that's all we get, everyone in the family will get to eat one, and it will have been a successful experiment.

But one of the pluses of living in Iowa arrived on time this week, in this long, hard summer. Sweet corn. I was driving past the parking lot next to the vacuum cleaner repair shop, and there was a rusted red pickup truck with a striped awning over the back, filled almost to overflowing with ears of sweet corn, just picked that morning. A farmer cheerfully filled a plastic grocery sack with twelve large ears for five dollars. I took them home, and served them boiled, with butter and salt, for dinner that night along with hamburgers off the grill. Easily my favorite summer meal. The corn was sweet and crunchy, and we ate seconds, butter running down our fingers.

There are a lot of things I would never buy out of pick up in a parking lot, but in Iowa, in late July and August, I will always stop for sweet corn. This year, it's a sight just as beautiful as the snowy egrets.

At the Farmers' Market

Our small town has tried several times to establish a farmer's market. The first year it consisted ofthree men who showed up on Thursday nights to sell fruit and vegetables out of their pickup trucks in the parking lot next to the ballpark. The offerings were basic: corn, tomatoes, beans, onions, and melons. After about six weeks, no one showed up anymore. The second year, the location was the same, and the vendors different. Again it didn't last the summer.

This year the farmer's market was moved to Sunday afternoon behind the town's rec center. This was a smart move. Not only is this location within biking and walking distance of more of the town, but it also attracts the rec center traffic--patrons who have come to work out, or to use the pool, the library, or the playground.

The first week there were four vendors. The gentleman with fresh pork and vegetables from his farm, the lady who had just opened her own herb shop in town and who gardens and bakes, the family selling elk meat and elk leather goods, and the lady selling home-made baked goods. That first week I bought tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuces. Glorious tomatoes! It had been such a wet, nasty spring that the tomatoes had been grown in a hot house. But I ate one everyday for week--often in a salad with the lettuce and cucumbers.

Four weeks later there were twice as many vendors with kohlrabi, potatoes, early onions, tiny strawberries, the end of the rhubarb and the radishes, and the beginning of pea pods and sugar snaps. There were two more ladies selling pastries and fresh fruit pies, and two other ladies selling their handmade jewelry. Then followed the two wonderful weeks of the sour cherry harvest. I couldn't get enough fruit either week to make a cherry pie, so I started hunting for crisp recipes. I turned to a cookbook I had just bought, Deborah's Madison's Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmers' Markets, just out this spring in paperback. In this book, she describes farmers' markets all over the U.S. and gives recipes grouped by what you will find in these markets seasonally. There's a great recipe in the book for a "Apricot-Cherry Crisp."

I didn't have any apricots or the sweet cherries the recipe called for, but the sour cherries worked great. The recipe calls for only two tablespoons of sugar to be added to roughly one pound of cherries. I increased this to a quarter cup for my two pints of sour cherries. I combined that with two tablespoons of minute tapioca and a dash of almond extract and poured into a buttered 8-inch square glass baking dish. Then I followed the crisp topping recipe exactly as Madison has it, and worked together six tablespoons unsalted butter, three-fourths of a cup of brown sugar, two-thirds of a cup of flour, and a dash each of salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. I baked it at 375 degrees until the juices from the cherries almost bubbled over the edge of the pan--about 30 minutes. We ate it warm out of the oven with a good french vanilla ice cream scooped on top. In the last two weeks, I have found nice sweet cherries and apricots (not indigenous to my local farmers' market) and made the recipe exactly as it appears in Madison's book. It's excellent. The apricots and cherries play off each other nicely, and barely need any sugar, as sweet as they are.

Last Sunday, the farmers' market had swelled to over twenty vendors, each with a colored tent to protect them from the harsh midday sun. As I pulled up, families were getting out of their vans to shop, kids and dogs in tow. It finally looked like a "market," busy with shoppers.There were melons, green beans, beets, sweet corn, peppers, potatoes, and squash of all shapes, sizes, and colors. The herb lady who has been there every week is now selling her hand-crafted breads and pastas as well as her herbs. The pork farmer still has his freezer of various cuts of meat (they are right next to the folks who sell the frozen cuts of elk), and his vegetables have expanded as well. My refrigerator is full and it's time to hunt for more recipes.

Eating Summer

Back in September, I posted about preserving the harvest. I talked about vegetables, herbs, and fruit--from my garden and the farmer's market--that I put by in a number of ways for the winter. And my, what a winter it has been! The total after last Wednesday's snowfall was almost 60 inches of snow in my area of the Iowa weather map. The yard and garden have been buried completely since before Christmas, and the snow just keeps piling up. I see the picnic table, and, longing, for summer, realize that it will be awhile before I sit there in the sun with a good book and a glass of wine.

But we have been eating the summer, from the freezer and the cupboard, since the first of January--my random date for starting to enjoy the fruits of 2007. A few notes on what worked and didn't work.

Frozen vegetables: Recently I made my corn, tomato, and black bean soup, using corn from the freezer that I had blanched on the cob last July and sliced off into bags and sealed. The corn was fabulous--it tasted like it had just been harvested and wasn't the least bit mushy. The asparagus that I blanched and froze, however, was mushy when recooked. I am not sure if I blanched it too long, or reheated it too long. I will have to try another sealed pouch and see.

Dried Fruit: I made this for snacking and it has been very good. The apples and the peaches and nice and chewy, but the watermelon was sublime. It had a chewy texture, like fruit leather, and a more powerful flavor than the peaches or apples. I will dry much more of this next summer since I have devoured what I already had. I have been throwing the dried tomatoes in any number of breads and other dishes. They were a very nice addition to a batch of crock pot pulled pork.

Dried Herbs: These have turned out predictably well. I like the dried rosemary on meats and breads, but I have had the most fun experimenting with the sage which I had never grown or used before. Now I automatically reach for it when cooking any kind of poultry. I like to grind the sage leaves in the mortar with sea salt and use it as a rub.

Freezer Jam: The peach freezer jam I made has a wonderful flavor, but is very watery once opened. You have to put it on bite-by-bite or it actually make your toast soggy. It was a quick way to save a lot of peaches from spoiling and going to waste right before Labor Day weekend, but next year I will definitely go back to canning jam the regular way. In the meantime, I am saving a jar to use as part of my next ham glaze with chutney in Nigella's recipe--maybe for Easter.

Frozen Pies: I have been freezing pies since we first got our large freezer some 20 years ago. I have learned that it works better to bake them most of the way, and then freeze them. This week we baked back to life a ginger-peach pie made from our own peaches. As is the case with frozen pies, the crust was not as perky as it had been originally, and the peaches were softer, but the pie tasted of warm summer nonetheless. It was gone in the span of just a few days.

The thing I am really longing for these days is to be able to fire up the charcoal grill. I want a juicy hambuger, a charred hotdog, some grilled vegetables, or a slab of pork back ribs. Unfortunately, we will need many more warm days before the grill and the smoker are free from their snowbank. And I have learned my lesson about not putting them away in the shed when I take care of the garden hoses. If the groundhog was right, maybe we will start to see more thaw in another two weeks.

First Frost

We have been gone on vacation, and have come home to the threat of first frost. Even though I ought to have been doing laundry today, I decided that the garden needed some attention. Since the leaves on the pumpkin vines that had spent the summer over running the side yard were starting to turn brown, I decided that it was time to pull the vines and harvest our crop of mini-pumpkins.

This involved grabbing the end of a vine and peeling it up from the long grass, like pulling on the end of a snarled garden hose. Strung along the length like Christmas lights were the small orange pumpkins. I was able to harvest some in mid-air, but others popped off the vine and rolled back into the tall grass. Once I tracked each vine back to the base plant, I cut it off for the burn pile. This was hard work. The grass obscured portions of the vines, and tried to hang on as I wrenched the vines up in the air. Pumpkins popped every which way like beads off a necklace.

After I had pulled up all the vines, I waded carefully through the tall grass, hunting mini-pumpkins like errant Easter eggs. I pulled and I yanked, and I yanked and I pulled. As I collected the pumpkins, I lined them up in rows across the top of the weathered, rickety picnic table. Kirby, our large cranky black and white cat, patrolled the benches back and forth, upset because I was filling up her table-top sunning spot.

When I was finished , I counted: twelve dozen mini-pumpkins of assorted sizes and shades of orange.  Along the way I found the missing zucchini vine sporting a large marrow shaped like an inflated cucumber.  Zucchini vines are supposed to be so prolific, yet this was only the third squash I had harvested off this vine. My husband's theory is that the pumpkin vines sucked all the energy from the other things I planted. The pumpkin vines certainly overran the carrots, but I found the beets, at least four of them still going strong. And the eggplant has an odd cant to it, as purple oblongs pull it in two different directions. The onions and the herbs are still going strong, the blossoming fennel waving frowzily, scenting the garden air with her licorice perfume. I suppose I should have pulled the bulb by now, but I know no one will like it but me, and I like her woozy presence in the yard.

The big surprise of the afternoon was finding four bean plants, low to the fence, sporting enough green and purple string beans for a meal. After the first harvest months ago, I would have assumed they were done, but they seem to have been protected from the summer heat by large pumpkin leaves. Heaven knows the tomatoes didn't bear well. The plants are at least two feet shorter than last year's. I have gotten about a half dozen small Roma's and not much else, although the Big Boy's are now covered with fruit. The yellow tiny plum tomatoes, the sports that came up from last year, are bearing like mad, and I can pick handfuls to eat every day. But there has not been the bounty of sauce tomatoes I had hoped for. The big surprise was that I found three pumpkins of more normal proportions, survivors from the one Spooky Pumpkin vine I planted. They are small by Halloween pumpkin standards, and one is still green, but they will be fun to carve anyway.  I found a pumpkin cookbook with directions for roasting the minis. I will have to try it and see what comes from it. If nothing else, we will have plenty of decorations for Halloween.