Saturday, November 22, 2008

Oh bountiful harvest

It's Thanksgiving in a few days and it's a time of harvest for most of the western world. Here in the USA we celebrate Thanksgiving and when I was a kid in the UK we celebrated Harvest Festival. I thought it would be a great time to harvest some beautifully-grown fall vegetables from our garden in honor of this time.

Then I remembered that we haven't successfully grown crap. We planted our garden in August and it's November now and we still have nothing to show for it, yet we're still at it. This is surely a testament to two things: 1) My lack of gardening skills 2) My tenacity.

So I went to the garden determined to have something to show for this week of harvest and found the following jaw-dropping yumminess you see below. Allow yourself a moment to take it all in.

First we have my one red cracked tomato that does not have blossom end rot. It's a tiny thing, but it's red and doesn't appear to be bug-eaten, so it got plucked from the vine. It's smaller than a real tomato and larger than a cherry tomato and it's got more cracks than our driveway, but it's ours. Maybe we'll slice it up and get out a Ritz cracker and each take a tiny nibble. Mmmmmm.....

Next we have a peanut. I actually think our peanut plants might be doing okay. I'm not entirely sure when we pull them up. I've heard that you should pull up one peanut to check for doneness. I pulled one up out of the ground and now realized I have no idea how to tell the difference between an under-ripe and fully-ripe peanut. Will read up on that.
Finally we have some carrots. These weren't really supposed to come up, but everytime I hit the garden I find smallish carrots that are growing next to my larger carrots and crowding them out. I am not a good thinner apparently. So these ones below are being sacrificed for the greater good. Two of them are only slightly smaller than a sickly baby carrot, so maybe we'll actually take a nibble and see how they taste.
So there you have it. The most pathetic harvest you have ever seen. Almost 4 full months of tending to this garden almost daily and that's all we have to show for it. Yes, yes, we have had plenty of great experiences, but nothing to lay on the ole' Thanksgiving table.

Farmer B took one look at this harvest and said "Can you imagine being a Pilgrim and coming over here knowing you had to grow all of your own food just to survive?" I quickly reminded him that my people waited a bit longer and came over on British Airways, thank you very much.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ha! That was a very funny post. I've got a tiny potato harvest, that you'll just have to see! I actually harvested less than what was planted! Ha!

EG

Anonymous said...

ROFLOL! Too, too funny. Who gets the peanut?

Anonymous said...

Hey Kate - check out my mammoth taters I grew! Ha!

EG

Unknown said...

That's a lot more than I have harvested lately.

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