A Lovesome Thing

The garden is starting to 'come in,' as we say around here. The squash are already getting away from me and I've consigned several lunkers to the chickens -- I mean, there's only so much zucchini bread up with which my family will put. But some of these young ones appeared tonight, stuffed with breadcrumbs and onions and topped with bacon (for extra flavor, as we prefer it.)

The first almost-ripe tomato has me dreaming of fresh mozzarella and basil -- or BLTs. (There's that bacon again.)





In spite of clear evidence that deer have eaten the tops off many bean plants, there was a nice mess of thin young Blue Lakes for dinner (Miss Birdie would be appalled at how young I pick them -- no 'bean' to them a-tall!)

And there was lettuce, a few asparagi (time to quit cutting these and let them build their strength for next year,) a green pepper, basil, and three beautiful, long cucumbers to complete my morning harvest.

"A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot" said Thomas Edward Brown, in his poem "My Garden" and so it is -- especially in this early stage.

I was checking this quote in my Bartlett's when, just above it I found a small series of garden-related lines from Charles Dudley Warner's My Summer in a Garden (1870).

The progression of his sentiments is revealing.

Preliminary -before starting his garden, CDW wrote:

"To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds and watch the renewal of life -- this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.

By the third week, he had made a discovery:

"What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it."

And by the sixteenth week:

"The thing generally raised on city land is taxes."

I think I detect a growing sense of disillusionment -- I know, from my own experience, that there will come a time in late summer when, though the garden is still offering a few stunted tomatoes and the peppers are thriving, for the most part it's bug-eaten, weedy and blighted. That's when I'll begin to think fondly of a killing frost