Another Minnesota season has arrived ~ August 24, 2005

David Heiller

Sue greeted us with a box of tomatoes on Saturday night.

Sue Hulsether called a dance and left her
calling card: a box of tomatoes!

She had come to call a dance, and she figured someone might need a few tomatoes. She had more than she could use.

A few people took some over the course of the evening, but most of them are sitting on our kitchen counter right now, along with the cucumbers and zucchini that I took to work last week.

We have more cukes and zukes than we can use, so I passed a few of them off to my co-workers.

Then Robin at work asked if anyone could use some squash. She planted quite a few, and although they aren’t quite ripe, she can already see a surplus, and is planning for their distribution. She has more than she can use.

She was following the footstep of Jill, who had given me a feed bag full of sweet corn a week earlier. She couldn’t use it all.

All of this made me realize that we have another season in Minnesota going on right now, the More Than We Can Use season. It falls between real summer and fall, when the gardens are peaking and we don’t know what to do with stuff.

It can be defined partly by the weather, and it is fine weather indeed. The air is cooler, clearer. You cuddle up with your sweetheart at night, and you grab a sweatshirt when you get up in the morning.

David and Noah with a pumpkin harvest.

Those brutal days of July are gone. We might get a few more scorchers, but you can smell autumn just ahead. And those brutal days of July, are the reason for the richness of the garden. That’s when the roots went deep and the fruit set. You could almost hear the corn grow then, and that Joe Burg alfalfa looked good enough to eat.

Avery with a VERY amazing pumpkin! David did a cool, very David thing every year with the pumpkins.
When the pumpkins reached a workable size,
he would go into the patch, and choose a few for children that we knew well. He then used a nail to scratch each child's name into a pumpkin. When pumpkin harvest time came, he would call the child and tell them that somehow there was a pumpkin in our garden just for them, that somehow a pumpkin had appeared with their
very name on it. What a guy!

I had to grease my pumpkins, they were growing so fast back then. They moved across the garden like an angry squid. You had to dance a jig to get out of the way. Without a little lubrication, they would like to have burned the hillside from the sparks and friction.

In other words, need any pumpkins?

Some of the produce will go to waste, and it’s good to learn to accept that. Sue gave me permission to throw her tomatoes in the compost pile if I couldn’t use them, and some of the older ones are going to get pitched, because I have my own set of tomatoes to process and give away,

Don’t feel guilty. We all have a lot of the “waste not, want not” philosophy, and we don’t like throwing stuff away.

Rosie loved harvest time. Here she has stolen the butt-end of the cauliflower that we ate for dinner that night. 
She did take it upon herself to harvest her own sweet corn. Yup, she picked a low one, brought it to her little bed, husked it and ate every single kernel. Oh Rosie!

But those big cucumbers that even Jill Hahn wouldn’t eat, what are you going to do with them? And that zucchini the size of a white oak log at Staggemeyer Stave, not even a kind hearted soul like Doris Mitchell would take it in.

Every day something from the garden makes it to the dinner table, and that feels very good. We eat what we can and what we can’t we can. We fill the fridge with bread-and-butter pickles, freeze the Myhre corn, bake zucchini bread, pickle the beets, and pawn off the rest.

It’s a good time of year, this bountiful season. We don’t often have More Than We Can Use. Let’s enjoy it while we can.