There is nothing like your hands stinging like red hot pins and needles that make you wonder why you are up at 8am in the morning in the dank cold 45degree fog up to your elbows in mud, leaves, and slugs. This morning after dropping my son off for carpool, Timothy and I had to ponder that as we picked over what made it through our last mini monsoon of the previous 4 weeks.
Three-stuffed garbage bags of produce were much more than I would have expected. We had two colors garnet and purple Asian mustard greens, multicolored mini carrots, with fashion names like “purple haze”, collard greens that seem to like the worst nature can give, growing greener and sweeter with each gloomy day. A whole bag of spinach, which I had doubts about when I planted. Two kinds made our catch today. “Giant Teton” and … dammit I can’t remember. But they looked so different. One had large angular heartleaves, the other one rounder, ruffled, and cottony to my petrified fingertips.
This is just the beginning for us. Just a few years ago, I would not even known there were so many types of spinach. At the grocery stores they only come in the cello clam shell encased baby spinach or the bigger ones that come with stems, some sand, and blue rubber bands wound tightly around their midsections.
It was a good haul. Not bad, a reminder of just how much we can do with our hands, time, patience, and a little love for the earth, and the things that can grow there. As I write this, Nash (the cat) just killed a cute grey field mouse behind me on the carpet. I was thinking of helping the little guy out, but Nash brought him in for me to, I think he wants to share. It’s dead now. Snack anyone?
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