Monday, October 8, 2018

Au Revoir Les Courgettes

At three o’clock this afternoon I decided to go look at the garden.

The sun was already heading toward la couche and the clouds were dark enough to cover most of what the sun had left for the day.

It was somewhere between dim and dismal.

“Autumn in the Pacific Northwest”, I thought to myself.

The chard whose seeds I planted six weeks ago are trying valiantly to become plants before the first frost.

I hope they do.

Mysti makes a chard tarte that is as good as a steak.

Sprinkled with vigorous and random, but copious, abandon among the chards are some children of this year’s lettuce crop; there are two kinds; I haven’t figured out yet what, though.

I scanned the tomatoes.

“I have picked all that can be expected to be of use this year”.

“Maybe a burst of late season warmth will redden up the rest of the cherries, but I doubt it”.

Then I looked at the zucchini.

There are nine of them.

I planted them as seeds rather than buying starts.

They all came up on schedule and I was confronted with the need to thin them.

But I just couldn’t do it; they were my little green friends; they had done what I had asked of them; they had sprouted; I felt obligated to let each of them live; so I figured out how to expand the bed and spread them out; and they all prospered.

Tonight’s dinner is the last bowl of the soup from the last of their progeny.

I looked at them, all yellowed and barren; even before the frost, cold nights, and dark days, take the last spirit out of them.

“How sad”.

But then, “mes tres, tres, tres chers amis”.

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