Please join me every Monday for discussions on food...
Yes, it is Tuesday. Monday morphed into a new day and so, in commemoration of some leap year somewhere, Munchy Monday will fall this week on a Tuesday...
"'The Land teaches us more than all books: because it resists us'" Antoine de Saint Exupery
Have you ever tried to grow something, be it fancy green tropical household plant or punchy peas, only to have it miserably fail? Either it just doesn't appear, leaving great disappointment in its wake as hopes of fresh veggies abounded, or it shoots up, raises its tendrils towards the sun and then, suddenly, for no apparent reason (or perhaps for one: like having forgotten to water them), it slumps over, browns, and turns back to dirt.
A lot of this plant life-and-death has happened in our "back forty" (back forty feet!) this year. An incredibly lengthy duration of Dry followed by an exceptionally lengthy duration of monsoonish Wet results in very little garden production...a few green tomatoes still cling to their browning stems, the corn stalks are barely tall enough to be recognizable and certainly not robust enough for the decore we usually have by the door, and the peas donated about 17 pods to our taste buds and tummies this season.
The Land indeed resisted my efforts this year.
Until I read Abby Adams' The Gardener's Gripe Book I had never considered that I was a "control freak" - that all gardeners are in fact "control freaks" as we attempt to manipulate the land to our own desires. "A garden is not nature," she states and for some reason this shocked me. For part of me truly believed I was promoting nature and growth and all good green things that go glove-in-glove with gardening acts of passion. But, as she points out, "Nature is what wins in the end".
And so I live with a lack of abundance of fresh-from-our-garden veggies...and so my soups' bounty will have to come from other sources.
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