The Peaceable Kingdom

NOV-DEC.

As we pull the curtains early after supper to shut out the dark these days, I see the wide old window sills piled high with gourds. They're all volunteers from the tired gourds we tossed out on the snow last January (some are bumpy . . . those are the ones I like best) and the sight starts me summing up the year's harvest.

Our vegetable garden did well last summer and we have tomatoes, beets, applesauce, rhubarb, relishes, pickles and jams jarred to last the winter. "There's corn, peas, beans, broccoli and green soybeans in the freezer and the old dirt-floored root cellar in the basement holds six bushels of potatoes, three bushels of beets and smaller amounts of carrots, rutabagas, parsnips and turnips. The potatoes are heaped in the cellar and covered with dirt . . . the other vegetables are stored in big cans set on the floor. We'll concentrate on eating the root vegetables while they're still good and move on to the frozen ones when the beets turn flabby and the carrots start to wobble.

We filled our home freezer long before we ran out of good things that we wanted frozen so we rented a six cubic foot freezer locker in town for $8.00 a year and keep our extra vegetables and meat there.

Notice I didn't mention pumpkins and squash. We did plant them but the squash borers and beetles came early and stayed late. Maybe next year . . . !

We also lost our entire crop of garlic when we turned our backs and the weeds took over that row of the garden. Crabgrass can really zap an easily-overwhelmed crop like garlic. Next year we'll get that grass out while it still looks innocent. Really. We will. We may neglect something else, but we can't afford to lose another crop of garlic!

We'll soon finish the sweet onions . . . a real fun crop this year because they got so big and kept so well. Last year we harvested them in August and hung them by their tops in the garage after they'd cured in the sun for two days. By September they were all squashy in the middle. This year we cured them a few days longer, cut off the tops leaving an inch or so of neck and stored the sweet onions spread out in a warm, dry (now cold) room. And they've kept and kept . . . giving me a fine oniony glow of satisfaction whenever I notice the prices on the sweet onions during one of my bike trips to the store. When our mild ones are finally gone, we'll dip into the three big net bags of strong onions hanging from nails over the cellar stairs.

We dug sweet potatoes until hard frost and hope this year's surplus will keep better than last year's kept. All our sweets were very slow to reach any respectable size and we blame the unusually cool summer. Sweet potatoes like it hot and we had many cool nights in our area. Of course, if our sweets are runty again next year, we'll have to find another excuse.