As this year's garden harvest is still ongoing, I thought I'd share photos from a year or two ago. There's something joyful about going out in the back yard and gathering everything you need for lunch. Blanching and freezing bags of green beans. Dehydrating carrots into hard little nuggets that---impossibly---rehydrate into plump, perfect rounds. Shelling dry beans and gathering seeds for next year. Taking bags of cucumbers to the local food bank. Gathering bouquets of kale. Lining up jars of tomatoes that glow like jewels on the shelf.
Sometimes there are challenges, and even though I've been gardening for almost 40 years, not every harvest is plentiful. Sometimes rabbits get the zucchini and squirrels behead the kale. Sometimes earwigs find the cabbage and heat takes out the spinach. There are some years things just refuse to germinate or thrive. There was the infamous year the bought-in sheep manure contained weed seeds and I basically had to garden with a machete.
By the time September rolls around, I'm tired of salad and ready for hearty soups and stews. This year I've grown my own black lentils, and I'm looking forward to trying them out. They'll probably make about a tablespoon-worth of soup, but at least I'll know I can do it. The time to practise growing food is before the famine hits.
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