GARDEN GUILT

I’m having a hard time with my conscience these days.

It’s not that I’ve robbed a bank, or murdered anyone, or even so much as shop-lifted a package of gum.  No, it’s much more pervasive than that; I have garden guilt.  I get it every year.

I don’t know why I put myself through this; I do recognize that I am responsible for my own suffering.  If I didn’t plant a garden I wouldn’t have to deal with its over production.  It wouldn’t be my problem to deal with beets the size of footballs, or 2396 carrots, or cucumbers that have a harvest window of three days between too-small-to-see and ginormous-overripe-seed-pods.  I wait all summer for my first cucumber and then four days into their ‘season’ I find myself asking why I thought I needed more than one plant.  Every.  Single.  Year.

It all seems so innocent and Mother Earth-ish in May when I plant my garden.  The sun is shining.  The grass is green.  The freshly tilled earth is warm and welcoming.  I envision garden lettuce salads and crisp, crunchy radishes, and snitching fresh peas and carrots with the grandchildren.  In my mind there is never too much of anything.  It’s always just the right amount.  They say that ‘experience is the best teacher’; obviously this is only true when you pay attention in her class.

We have gone from a family of six down to just the two of us.  Correspondingly I have made an honest effort to shrink the garden area, with only limited success.  Yes, my veggie garden is much smaller, but now we have a huge space that we call our orchard which has morphed into extra space to put the bigger things … like corn and potatoes and pumpkins and cucumbers and onions and watermelon.  This year it even got an extra row of peas because I had extra seed.  The pretense of downsizing my actual garden space has been completely canceled out by having orchard overflow.  I am my own worst enemy.

Maybe it would help if I sat down and documented my struggle.  Would I actually pay attention to warnings like “Yes, Jocelyn, one row of carrots will be plenty!”  or “No, Jocelyn, throw that two year old package of string beans away!  Do NOT put them in the ground just to ‘see what happens’!”?  I’ve learned my lesson on zucchini, but I keep repeating the carrot and beet mistakes.   Don’t even get me started on the countless bean fiascos I have faced.

This summer, due to dry conditions, a less than perfect germination and a hungry family of gophers, the over production problem hasn’t been as bad as normal years.  I managed to use almost all of my beets before they got tough and stringy, I ended up only having to wash and store one bag of carrots and they fit nicely into my fridge.  There were only enough peas to eat fresh.  This year my guilt was all about beans (I pulled them up and hauled them away – also known as hiding the evidence), and cucumbers (I continually chucked the oversized, overripe ones into the trees.  The dog eventually tired of bringing them back). 

My third antagonist is an epic tomato harvest.  It’s going to be the undoing of me.

I know tomatoes are a versatile fruit and can be used in many ways but there is still only so much pasta sauce and salsa a two person household can use.  The next batch will be stewed tomatoes but there’s a limit to how much of that we can use too.  Right now the boxes of ‘pending’ are out in the unheated garage so they ripen more slowly, which only means that I am prolonging my agony.  Every time I go out there the guilt about doing something useful with them hits me: they shame me with their pungent scent.

We have been known to go to exceptional lengths to use up unneeded garden produce (a crazy excess of pumpkins for target practice one sunny Thanksgiving afternoon comes to mind), but the smart thing to do, as I am reminded of often, would be to have a pig or two to feed the extra too.  I have many problems with this … building a pen that will hold pigs in, having to deal with the fly problem they create, being tied down to having animals to care for when we want to go away, and (and this is a big ‘and’) my guilt burden over under-utilized garden vegetables is already too high … do you know what eventually happens to big, healthy pigs?

I prefer my protein to be anonymous, thank you very much.  The last thing my conscience needs is pork chop guilt.