Category Archives: Gardening

About Tomatoes

Posted on by

It’s that time of year again – that sad time when I’m getting close to the bottom of the tomato bowl. OF COURSE, I’m not talking about imported/Costco/mealy/poor-substitute tomatoes. It’s mid-October and the last of my home grown tomatoes are about to ripen – and be eaten – with relish (the verb not the noun.)

I come from a family of tomato eaters and I married into a family of the same. You’d think we were Italians, the way we all cultivate and nurture our own tomato plots. Rick and I have moved several times and garden-spot or not, I have always found a place to plant my own personal crop of Beefsteaks, Tiny Tims and the like – even if it was in the front yard instead of the usual petunias. Overgrown zucchini and a glut of green beans are often abandoned on doorsteps of unsuspecting friends and relatives. But no one really likes sharing their tomatoes. Not even me.

I know that my mother canned plenty of ripe tomatoes for all the soups and stews we would inhale all winter long. But the gold standard of tomato use in our family was The Tomato Sandwich. There was no need to muck about with pumpernickel or Grey Poupon or even cheese. All that was necessary was white bread, Kraft Miracle Whip, salt and pepper and a generously sliced, ripe red tomato. The result was two triangles of ambrosial goodness. It was hard to get tired of such sustenance when we were in tomato season. And even though it got a little soggy, the tomato sandwich was still a favorite sandwich to find in my lunchbox at school.

During these last tomato days, Rick and I will indulge on the weekends with tomatoes on our morning toast. I keep it regular with good old mayonnaise and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Rick prefers to eat his toast and tomatoes – as his whole family does – with honey. And although I have been woo’d to taste and see the Donily side of many dishes, I can’t seem to cross the mayo to honey barrier. Tomato time is too short to take such a gamble.

Nowadays, if I have an overabundance of tomatoes, I throw them in the freezer whole for future butter chickens or hamburger soups. I take advantage of the green tomatoes and will bread them like they are chicken legs and fry them up at least once a season. And every supper is graced with a sliced tomato on the side in high season. Sometimes, we’ll fry up the bacon for some BLTs. But nothing – for me – will compare to the plain old humble tomato sandwich.

About the Farm (and Some Pigs)

Posted on by
“Pigs by the Radiator” Copyright Sharlie Donily

One thing I have been using a lot more during the pandemic is a nice little library app called Libby. It’s like a one-stop shop for all my digital library needs – especially audiobooks. Sometimes when I just want to listen to something while I walk or cook or exercise, I check out what’s available right now – kind of like Russian library roulette. And so, I found myself listening to Charlotte’s Web. The bonus: it was read by the author E. B. White himself.

I came to this classic book kind of late, not reading it until I was in my thirties. I was enchanted then and was enchanted again as I listened last week to a story about a couple of unlikely best friends: a pig and a spider. The setting however, was not unfamiliar to me: a barn with lots of other residents. In the story there are cows, geese, even a rat who goes through his own story arc. And I reminisced a little about when I had a barn to visit like Fern, the girl who saved Wilbur the pig from an early demise.

One of my favorite memories about living on the farm, however, isn’t about me visiting the animals in the barn but the other way around. In the early spring, when a litter of baby pigs arrived but the temperature dipped too low for their safety, my Dad or my brothers would bring a cardboard box of piggies into the house for the night. The box would be placed next to the wall register in my bedroom off the kitchen and I was lulled to sleep by the gentle squeaks of warm baby piggies. (I would pay cash money for a sleep app that featured a “warm newborn piglets in a cardboard box” soundtrack.)

I’m so thankful for having grown up on the farm. Although it was never my ambition to keep being a farm girl, I am glad that I know where my bread and butter actually do come from. I’m re-reading another favorite right now – Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver – about her family’s year-long chronicle with eating a diet of only locally sourced foods, much of which was grown on their own farm. I decided to read this book slowly, enjoying the corresponding chapters with each ensuing month. It starts in March. Kingsolver, an wonderful writer, but also a botanist and a vigilante gardener outlines in the introduction how very far removed most people are from the source of their food. Even a biologist friend, hearing Kingsolver recap over the phone the goings-on in her garden was surprised to hear that the potatoes were “up”: she thought that potatoes only had bottoms, no tops.

Most of us who grow up on the farm know that you name your pets with caution, understanding the caveat that having a name doesn’t mean they will escape their eventual fate like Wilbur the Pig does. (And zero of us knows a spider who managed it.) But there’s something very gratifying about knowing where your Easter ham comes from or the colored eggs (hint: not a bunny) or the asparagus that Kingsolver rhapsodizes about in her March chapter.

Thank goodness for farmers and writers who remind us of these simple life-giving things.

(Oh, and Instagrammers, too!)

About Weeds

Posted on by
Oh, the tenacity!

It’s been a weird year. (Oh, sorry. I should have started with the caveat that I would introduce this post with a Magnificent Understatement.)

For starters there was the COVID. I was reminiscing just yesterday morning about how I used to go to the local library and peruse the shelves, TOUCH THE BOOKS, and not even think twice about how much fun that was. We used to eat free samples at Costco, high five strangers at hockey games and plan vacations with hotels and amusement parks. We even used to think that the United States was relatively harmless.

On a personal note, we sold a business which changed my job from going in to an office regularly to exclusively working from home. This happened to coincide with the whole world #stayinghome so at first it just was part of the General Weirdness. Then everyone that had camped out in my house with me for those two months went back to their regularly scheduled programming, but with face masks and lots and lots of hand sanitizer.

At first, it was pretty weird being Alone In The House Again, but I got used to it because I have a certificate in Introvert Skills. I still went for lots of long walks, because that was A Pandemic Recreation Highlight that I liked. I shopped for groceries (without free samples anywhere) and learned to do pretty much everything, including some grocery shopping, online.

At the beginning of 2020, we had also moved into a new/different house, under cover of a lot of snow. It’s only been about seven months here, but let’s just say, I’m pretty familiar with all the insides of this house. We’ve made changes to suit us better and to make it feel like Home. Most of the square footage of the house gets inspected daily, especially since I got a FitBit and get reminded to complete 250 steps at ten minutes to every hour. I do a couple laps up and down the stairs, check for boogeymen in the bedrooms and pee in the downstairs toilet. If I excel, I get rewarded with a little fireworks celebration on my left wrist when I hit 10,000 steps (not for peeing.)

All this is to say, I seem to be taking the Stay (in the) Home thing kind of seriously, much to the detriment of my yard. Unlike all those other teal, emerald and lime thumbed folks out there who stormed the greenhouses in Spring 2020, I did only my bare minimum of planting lots of tomatoes and a few other plants that would mostly die under my watch.

And then I dug my heels in about the weeds.

All around this “new” house of ours are plenty of gravel beds, the kind that harbour weeds like they were hostages in a Die Hard movie. To add to the matter, these weeds have some kind of Stockholm Syndrome where they don’t want to be released. And NOTHING is so unsatisfying as pulling out the TOP of a weed, knowing you’ve guaranteed its roots to multiply in perpetuity. So I just kinda gave up trying.

But a funny thing has happened. I’m starting to enjoy the weeds. Well, okay, not the weeds exactly, but certainly their tenacity. I mean weeds have this Amazing Ability to Grow Anywhere.

And also: Weeds Have No Shame. We live on a corner lot with one of those gravel beds right there for everyone to inspect as they walk by. There are plenty of weeds already camouflaging the rocks, but there is One Dandelion in particular that just has some attitude. Every day, she stands a little taller and gets a little yellower and I swear, has one leaf bent over one hip. I tell myself that I should go pull (her) out, I make reminder notes in my daily planner to do it, I write freaking blog posts about it this damn dandelion.

But: I kinda wanna see how far she’s gonna take this, y’know. And I’m not exactly going anywhere (especially the United States), so I might as well have something to watch out my front window. If there’s something that needs to be admired right now it’s the ability to flourish in less than optimal circumstances.

What a sassy dandelion.

About Gardening, Again

Posted on by

So maybe my garden is not the hopeless case I thought it was going to be when I wrote about it a few weeks ago.

Okay, there’s still a bald patch where the cucumbers committed vegecide, but I could just pretend that some lettuce was growing there and we already ate it. And the beans are promising to make a nice side dish for supper next week.

There’s even some unearned glory, as we never planted this:

But the real redemption that happened is this:

REAL tomatoes. In fact, I still had some fake cherry tomatoes from my last Costco shopping spree and they were downright embarrassed to share the counter with such beauties. They’re not going to show their faces around here for awhile.

Tomatoes aside, this time of year has me hankering for all the other garden offerings, even some over large zucchini squash, as the seeds I planted stood me up.

In that spirit, here’s a throwback homage (from my old column, with a few updates) to that oh-so-versatile veggie that holds up the end of the alphabet:

            Every year a collective forgetfulness falls over all true vegetable gardeners. Inevitably, as they pass by the seed racks in the grocery stores, they pick up an extra package of zucchini seeds. Or perhaps it happened during the previous fall when they decided to dry an extra dozen or so. And then the funniest thing happens come planting time: they plant all of them! Or so it seems. Zucchini season hits and the squash are exploding off the vines faster than acne on a teenager.

            If you don’t have a garden, you aren’t exempt from the onslaught. The sweet Ukrainian lady next door who, in the summertime, you only glimpse bobbing and weaving between her giant beanstalks and rows of oak-like corn, sneaks over in the early morning and deposits 2 or 3 zucchini in a Tom-Boy bag on your doorstep. Perhaps they are concealed under a few onions, some new potatoes and two or three cukes, but all the same they’re there. And you know it’s her because you’ve seen her stash of vintage plastic. But unlike the proverbial baby in the basket, she has left no instructions of what to do with them. She was just happy to have a break from making another batch of pineapple-zucchini marmalade. (Or from pretending that zucchini curls really do taste like pasta.)

            So, once you’ve eaten your fill of zucchini bread, zucchini chocolate cake and you’ve canned enough zucchini jam for everyone under your Christmas tree, you may be ready for some creative zucchini alternatives. For instance, you could pretend you are any one of a number of fancy restaurants. After all, every time you go for a nice steak or chicken dinner, there it is on the side of your plate, a sautéed and garlicked pile of zucchini, disguised under the menu name “market vegetable”. (Or “gluten-free” spaghetti.)

            After you’ve exhausted every edible zucchini possibility, why not practice your carving skills? Use a paring knife to create a one-of a kind table centrepiece out of a monster zucchini: a boat with a cabbage leaf sail, a totem pole, a pair of Dutch clogs, you name it. Or just cut one into a basket shape, leaving a “handle” and scooping out the pulp. Use this as a serving dish for carrot and celery sticks. (Or for collecting more zucchini from your garden.)

            And finally, a truly Canadian option for the squash that got away on you: cut the zucchini lengthwise into slices approximately 1 inch thick and freeze them on cookie sheets. Once frozen, bag them, and then give them to your kids in the winter to use as hockey pucks on the backyard rink. It’ll make a great story for The Globe and Mail to dig up on your future Wayne Gretzky (Connor McDavid): “…so poor, the family couldn’t even afford a real puck…”

            It may be time to take an axe (or a paring knife) to the zucchini’s reputation that it is a boring and over-productive vegetable. As the days of summer (and COVID-19) go on, a zucchini may very well be the answer to the next time your child says, “Mom, I’m bored!!!” A word of caution, however: you may just run out of zucchini.

(Oh, and P. S. Go Oilers.)