I’ve been blessed with an abundance of tomatoes this year. My five yellow pear tomatoes are producing a quart or two a day although my Amish paste are not so prolific. Still, it’s enough that I can share with my neighbors and still have plenty to dry and eat and experiment with recipes (tomato preserves!), but not so much that I have to figure out how we safely can tomatoes these days. It reminds me of the summer of 1982 in south Arkansas. I stayed with my grandparents Childs that summer and picked up twelve hours at SAU while they got ready for the Big Blow Out (aka their 5oth wedding anniversary).
My Poppaw (Orval) would pick a mess or two of Kentucky Wonder beans (or have me pick, and he’d go behind and glean enough for another mess or two) and say we’re going to visit some old people. (That summer was also when I learned how big a mess is. It is approximately enough to feed the people who are receiving the mess. It has nothing to do with being messy – it’s from the Old French, missus, what is sent to the table, from mittere, to send. Like a missive or mess hall.) Off we’d go. He’d tell me a story about the folks we were visiting, we’d stop and visit, and leave them with the produce. Fairly often the ‘old’ people were younger than he was (72), but they didn’t have a garden. I guess that’s a reasonable way to measure if you’re old. You’re not old until you can’t raise a garden.
That was also the summer when I learned that he grew eggplant because he thought they were pretty, not because he wanted to eat them. A sign of plenty – when you have food to share, and can grow vegetables to look at instead of to eat.