I’m old enough to remember when the mostly immigrant families in my neighborhood shopped at farmers markets and fruit stands. They shopped only when they had crop failures in their backyard gardens.
I’m pleased we have a thriving farmers market in Durango, where the prices fluctuate according to supply and demand. This month is an awesome jackpot month at the farmers market. Even the least food aware among us now is in tune with the definition of fresh and sustainable.
When local produce is affordable, it’s time to get serious about food preservation.
As a third generation American, with grandparents from “the old country,” we were lucky enough to grow most of what we ate, long before farm to plate was a trend. Our “landscaped’ backyard was a fenced orchard: three varieties of apples, two types of pears, two plums, one nectarine and a single peach tree that a five-year-old named Karen accidentally set on fire when she found a book of matches behind the garage. (Note to parents of pre-schoolers. This is what happens when parents opt for trees instead of swing sets.)
Our backyard picket fence was draped with grapes. Grapes became grape jelly and juice. We grew slicing and canning tomatoes, bush beans, zucchini, not much lettuce, but several types of peppers, which were eventually canned with garlic in olive oil and served with scrambled eggs on ciabatta, still my favorite breakfast.
Much of this bounty ended up in quart-size Mason jars in our basement. I can’t remember how the food actually got there, but I suspect it happened while I was outside playing with matches.
All of this came back to me last week when I visited my Ohio property. On a previous visit over Memorial Day weekend, I recall throwing a pack of cucumber seeds in a little plot of soil outside my little cabin. I also planted a half dozen tomato plants and two peppers purchased at a local flea market. Other than that, this plot went mostly unattended, except for the placement of wire cages around my tomato plants.
Flash forward three months.
Imagine the cucumber version of that favorite childhood tale, Jack and the Beanstalk. I could not find the origin of my monstrous cucumber vine, but it climbed the tops of the tomato cages, twisting and turning, weighed down heavily with dozens of foot-long cucumbers. Several vines curly cued around shrubs in the adjoining garden. More vines wrapped themselves around 6-foot-tall cannas.
Within minutes of discovery, I filled a laundry basket full of cucumbers and handed them to everyone I knew. It didn’t make a dent.
What to do with cucumbers? Make pickles, of course.
I’m not a pickle fan, but I let someone convince me that bread and butter pickles were worth the effort. I know this much – canning is messy work. And it’s time-consuming.
It takes a few weeks to let the jars cure, but someone will eat these pickles and maybe even enjoy them. I consider pickles the nutritional equivalent of Twinkies, but stuffed in those jars of thick-sliced cucumbers are life lessons, I suppose.
I know what it takes to get food on the plate. I appreciate life at its “cellular” level, when seeds germinate and beat all odds to burst eventually into fruit. No matter your spiritual bend, doesn’t this feel pretty miraculous, that you can take a 98-cent pack of seeds and end up with jars of pickles in three short months?
Because of that 98-cent pack of seeds, I can appreciate the time it takes for the farmer to nurture and harvest and transport his cucumbers to the farm stand. Finally, I can only imagine his disappointment when he’s not able to sell what he grows.
Still, I never want to see another cucumber for as long as I live.
