TRANSITION TIME, aka HARVEST TIME

Our single remaining sunflower (after Irene)

It feels like one anyway, a transition.  Yesterday it was summer, and today, just like that, it is fall. (All right, not technically.)   We are looking to the west for the sunset around seven o’clock instead of eight or nine o’clock and I could swear it happened just this week.  

Although it’s been getting colder (suddenly), the garden is still producing great amounts of tomatoes, chile peppers, jalapenos, cucumbers and eggplants.  I have had daily harvests that nearly fill a big basket.  Back in June when I bought the basket it seemed like a frivolous purchase. Why would I need such a big basket for transporting a couple of tomatoes?  Hah!  This soil is something else. We can’t eat them fast enough.  We can’t make enough eggplant dishes.  (There really aren’t that many great eggplant dishes.  Look it up.  You’ll see.)  We can't eat heaps of jalapenos.  Cucumber soup is wonderful, but not for weeks at a time.  Tomatoes, well, they’re a different story.  A tomato dish I made a couple of times captures the essence of summer and is also blissfully simple to prepare (picture a hot day when you don’t really want to cook, and yet you have scrumptious tomatoes):

~12 (depending on size) small tomatoes, cherry or slightly larger

2 garlic cloves

1/3 cup finest quality olive oil

½ cup basil leaves

Sprinkling of salt

Parmesan Reggiano to taste

Quarter or halve the tomatoes, put the garlic cloves through a garlic press, tear up the basil leaves into small pieces.  Pour the olive oil into a small bowl and add the salt, basil, garlic, and tomatoes.  Marinate for one hour or more.  (Don't refrigerate.)  Cook the pasta.  Pour the tomato mixture over the warm pasta and top with Parmesan Reggiano.

Then there are the raspberries.  I thought raspberry season was over.  Not at all.  The raspberries just came into their own about two weeks ago.  What I picked in early August was only a sampling.

Making rows (left rear) and baling (right)

Speaking of changes, our field finally got mowed the other day, and about half of the old hay bales are gone.  The other half may have to wait until all the new hay has been hauled away.  Farmer Dan called around noontime that day to say he’d gotten hold of the guy who made the bales last fall, and they were here mowing and pulling out old bales by one o'clock that same afternoon.  After the newly-cut hay dried for a couple of days after that, he and another guy came by with equipment that tossed the hay into neat rows, then Dan followed up with a baler that sucked up the hay rows and every fifteen minutes or so spit out a giant marshmallow-shaped hunk of hay.  Then he hauled away some of the new bales.  Right  now we have some new bales, some neatly shorn meadow, and some old bales still in place.  Before the mowing, the last time we’d talked with Dan was near the end of July.   As the month of August went by Dan and the guy who left last years’ bales behind were likely taken up with chores more important or urgent than this.  It’s hard to know.  Farmers work in ways still mysterious to me.  Now with the grasses flattened we can walk anywhere in the field.  It gives you a new perspective–no more maze of corridors (made by Ken with our tractor mower) bordered by seven-foot-high grasses. 

New perspective of the sugar house; a hint of green shows where Ken's mowed path was.

Other transitions?  A group of ducks have been visiting the pond nearly every day, six each time.  (Migrating perhaps?  Or fleeing hunters?  It's duck hunting season.)  They come and leave together, never staying for more than a morning, or part of an afternoon.  A heron has been another occasional visitor.  The first time I saw the heron–I’m assuming it’s the same one each time, but I don’t actually know–it made a close pass by the tall front windows above the kitchen counters, casting a startling giant grey shadow.   A couple of days ago Ken watched the heron as it stood immobile near the pond.  With a snap of his head it scooped up not a fish, but a mouse from the grass.  It held the mouse for a minute or so, quite still.  It bent to the water, swished the mouse back and forth a few times, and gulp! down the hatch.