I'm still harvesting cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, cabbage, and kale out of my garden, and today I got the first ad for a new seed catalog. I'm pretty sure it's unusually early -- normally they arrive just as I start craving them in February -- but still I'm ravenous to look. The beautiful heirloom vegetables, the many beans I've never heard of, the tempting Chinese greens, the okra shaped like torpedoes, the poppies that look like peonies...
Every year I tell myself it's time to scale back, to stick to the basics that I know we'll eat. And every year I find myself pawing over the luscious photos and imagining myself selling Chinese greens to the Toronto Asian community and drooling over the plump tomatoes that never do turn out like their pictures. I want to try them all. Brilliant indigo-blue dry beans! Orange watermelon! Purple green beans! Football-sized Jicama! How can we content ourselves with the paltry, limp offerings at the grocery store? Nothing at Food Basics makes me want to rub it against my cheek with pleasure the way these heirlooms do.
It's not even October yet, and I've started plotting for next year.
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