of the bounty of the garden

hummus & falafel pita sammies, our first few tomatoes from the yard, many many otter pops.

Our gardens and my parents' gardens are somehow connected. I'm inspecting our Hillbilly tomato plants, looking for signs of flowering or fruiting. Frustrating! But then I finally spy them, probably the hips of flowers, the fruit probably too small to see, still up inside. The plants are actually covered with them. There is a tiny set of ruined, dried up fruit, too, on one plant, like four sun-drieds, but tiny. That won't happen again, we're on it.

And then I saunter over into my parents' gardens. They've been out of town, and I don't know my way around their vegetables. Here and there, I come upon more and more bushes. A bell pepper that is huge & tall, at least 5 feet tall and with two finished-- actually about 2 days over-ripe-- peppers, and many many more about to come ready. I take the two peppers, I will stuff and roast them.

Flash to me in my kitchen, I have Quorn cutlets and I want to shave them into fine cut strips, but my knifework is poor and I end up hacking them. I can do better and begin again, and I will mix that with rice and cheese.

Flash back to the gardens, I find a large tomato vine, again very tall, with many tomatoes but none ripe. In a big (waist high) plastic pot, I find a strange chile vine. It was covered, some time back due to weather, with a tarp with dirt on top of it. I pull this back and find that the vine has thrived and produced many, many chilies, slowly ripening in the wan, brownish light coming through the side of the pot. Some are nearly ripe, but not quite. WIth the full sunlight, we will have a bushel of chilies in only a day or two, now that they're uncovered.