The Garden Goes On

In spite of the current chaos in my home and some smashed parts of the yard outside, the garden is still busy making food. We had just brought in a big pile of veggies on Monday afternoon, before the disaster, and on Tuesday morning I harvested a little more:

If I aim the camera just right, it’s hard to tell that a tree fell on the house just a week ago. This part of the garden looks fine. The place where the okra was leveled is hidden behind some other tall plants:

The side yard was completely spared. It definitely looks fine:

Even though we’ve given away quite a lot of the most recently harvested fresh veggies (we are a little too preoccupied for canning), we still have plenty to work with. Joe managed to pull the dehydrator out of the debris, and after we cleaned it up we’ve been able to put it to use. The half-gallon jar on the table is full of dried tomato chips:

The melons are the first harvest from this year’s round of the great melon de-hybridization project. All the melons in the photo were harvested at “forced slip.” For each, the tendril nearest the melon was brownish, corky lines had begun to appear on the outside, and a definite aroma of ripe melon was easy to detect.

The first two we sliced through were both good, but they are not even close to being identical. One was very pale inside, and sweet. The other was green inside and less sweet. The paler one seemed to have more flavor, and it had a smoother texture, too.

When the seeds are dried and ready to package for next year, all that information will be recorded with them. It is likely that the seeds from the greener melon will not ever be planted, but it’s hard to know at this point what I will need in the next few years of the project. For now, I am saving seeds from all the melons that seem reasonably tasty.

I’ve also put some tomato pulp and seeds from this year’s Tomato Man’s Amish in a cup to ferment a little before separating out the seeds to dry and save for next year.

This all feels a lot like progress.

Hope everyone else’s gardens are doing well!

Home gardening can provide a lot of good food for families and communities. It’s also some work, but I love it. This blog is about the garden and yard where I “grow my own,” NW of Atlanta, Georgia.

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