T.T.: Living with Less

I love vegetables. I love them so much that I spend a significant amount of time and expend a significant amount of labor to grow them myself, because I cannot easily buy them. 

What that means is that I sort of eat seasonally, whether I want to or not.

Seasonal eating has become a trendy topic in the past decade or so, and I heartily endorse it. It has been pointed out that seasonal eating means you're going to be eating less glamorous things like collard greens and squash in November, not exciting things like fresh tomatoes or raspberries.

But it also means that at some points of the year, you're just . . . not going to be eating many fresh fruits or vegetables.

This is modern sacrilege, I know. We're all supposed to be maximizing our intake of fruits and vegetables--it used to be five a day, but I think that recommendation has increased--but that is just not feasible in a life that doesn't include grocery stores stocked with imported foods.

It is possible to always have something in the garden in most climates if you're willing to use plastic row cover or hoop houses. I don't do that, though, and that means that there are times of the year when my refrigerator produce drawers are almost empty.

This happens in the winter, of course, when I rely more on frozen or canned things from the previous summer. But it also happens, counterintuitively, right now. At about this point in the summer, the spring crops are pretty much done, and the summer crops aren't really ready yet*. It's at this time of year that I'll have maybe half a dozen snow peas one day, one or two small tomatoes the next, one last small cabbage that was later to harvest than the others . . .

But really, we are not eating a lot of vegetables right now. And that's okay. We're not going to have a vitamin deficiency if we can't harvest tons of fresh produce for a couple of weeks.

So I guess my tip here is this: If you're growing a garden to supply your own vegetables (yay for you!), accept the fact that it will not always be a steady and reliable stream of abundance. 

Non-gardeners would probably be surprised that the most bountiful time in a vegetable garden is not summer, but early fall.

Eating seasonally means sometimes just, well, not eating things, and that's okay. 

* Succession planting (which just means spreading out the planting of certain things over several weeks) helps with this, but I am not very good at that. And sometimes, it just doesn't work. The things that are planted two weeks earlier sulk and the things planted two weeks later take off and then everything is still ready to harvest at the same time.