Gardener's Glut

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What if neither a pig nor chickens is possible, and you can't even make a deal with someone in return for a share of pork or eggs? Then the thing to do is to sit down and decide which of your products are worth the trouble of preserving. The number will be small. It will include almost no vegetables. But if you have an apple tree, for example, you can reflect that whereas home-canned string beans are inferior to commercial frozen ones, and homefrozen legumes are apt to be only the merest shade better, homemade applesauce is almost invariably far superior to even the luxury commercial brands. If you don't peel the apples first, it's prettier, too.

The other thing you can do is to reflect upon what you can grow in a home garden that preserves itself—and that is also higherquality than what stores sell. Potatoes make a good example. Potatoes keep handily for six months or longer. One can grow many succulent varieties that agribusiness never touches. From a garden one can also pull out little new potatoes the size of walnuts and ten minutes later enjoy them lightly steamed for supper. Americans are eating fewer and fewer potatoes, except the greasy fries (invariably of a variety called Russet Burbank) that all hamburger chains sell. Presumably this is from fear of growing fat. It is a groundless fear. The grease at Wendy's will make you fat (and don't think I'm implying that grease loses this ability at McDonald's or Burger King), but potatoes in ordinary quantities will not. Ounce for ounce, potatoes and pears tie in number of calories.

But I'm afraid these are make-dos. The only real solution is a vegetable-eating animal. Myself, if I lived in a city apartment and had even a little balcony, I might try growing vegetables on one side of it and secretly keeping two hens on the other.

EDITORS NOTE: Noel Perrin is the author of First Person Rural, Second Person Rural, and Third Person Rural (all published by David R. Godine), three outstanding collections that contain "essays of a sometime farmer."

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