SEPTEMBER IS THE season of harvest, when we gather the fruits of our labors. It is the realization of a dream to have a small house and a large garden with a stream nearby.
Work in the garden is a year-round endeavor that might have begun in the autumn when we planted the bulbs of garlic that matured in the summer sun — then mildewed into green and black in the unseasonable cold and damp in the smoke house. Despite the best of intentions.
Undeterred, we look forward to harvesting from the garden to circumvent the outrageous profiteering of our greedy corporate overlords by simply walking to the garden to prepare our meals. Without benefit of the pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and the host of unpronounceable additives that infest the modern food chain.
This is not without a struggle.
We can think we are saving money growing our own food, but it comes with a cost of an aching back, blood, sweat and tears, with countless hours of effort and worry that can count for nothing in the end.
This is my story. A tragic tale of a Labor Day picnic gone wrong.
Historically, it is a day to celebrate labor by not doing any. Except, of course, for putting together a picnic, but that is a labor of love. And what is a picnic without potato salad? Made with fresh potatoes, ready for harvest now.
Digging potatoes must be my favorite thing. To thrust a fork into the soil, exposing a treasure of red, yellow and white spuds. Unless the mice got to them first, leaving you with the ABC variety, that is, already been chewed. You are left with some unappetizing scraps of vermin-chewed remains unsuitable for that other traditional dish of the Irish, creamed potatoes and peas.
Something else got the peas. Just as they were maturing with pendulous pods of succulent legumes almost ripe for the picking, the vines mysteriously died.
Pulling a dead vine, it was easy to find out why. Something had eaten the roots. Plants need roots to survive. I knew that.
After a good cry, we moved on.
It was time, after all, for the green beans to ripen. And who doesn’t love green beans?
There are just so many ways to cook them, even without bacon. Unless they are turning black from being wrapped in their dying foliage from that spell of wet weather we were talking about.
So, we just wiped the black, molding leaves off the beans in an attempt to make them look edible and moved on to the artichokes. They were supposed to be the whole reason for having a garden in the first place.
Unfortunately, there was only one artichoke in the whole patch. It grew to the size of a tennis ball and fell over. Where it was soon hidden in an impenetrable carpet of weeds.
At least we could count on the onions.
Digging through the barren dirt for a handful of onions the size of golf balls hardly seemed worth the trouble. And it wasn’t.
At least there was some lettuce. It’s supposed to grow good in this country. It does.
Lettuce grows with amazing speed and goes to seed so quick you are left with a bitter bunch of foul-tasting vegetation that’s off-putting no matter how much blue cheese you smother it with.
There’s nothing like a home-grown tomato to go with that lettuce in a salad. Unless it turns black and rots about the time it turns red.
Leaving us to harvest one bit of gardening advice: Give up.
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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.
