Grape Arbors and Zucchini

I’m ashamed to admit that I stole green peppers from a neighbor’s garden as a kid. I was goaded into it, but had no trouble biting into the delicious and juicy vegetable.
I would never steal from a garden today since I appreciate the work and worry that backyard gardens require.

Growing up on Caroline Street, we didn’t have vegetable gardens, but flowers and fruit trees and berry patches. Plucked the first rhubarb of the season from along basement walls. Watched neighborhood cats roll in the wild catnip behind the garage. Neighbors had gardens, though, and were proud of them.

Across the street was an arbor of Concord grapes—round, purple-blue, juicy, and tasting like the tiny bottles of Welsh’s grape juice we got as kids from Great-Uncle Harold. Birdshot discouraged illegal grape-pickers, though not entirely.

Married and raising children in my childhood home on Caroline Street, we had various vegetable gardens, some ambitious, with salad vegetables, winter squash, beefsteak tomatoes, corn, and summer squash. Not zucchini, not after the first year.

It was a bumper crop year for zucchini. Everybody filled bushel baskets with them. We fried them with tomatoes, peppers, and onions. We dipped them in egg and bread crumbs and made parmigiana (not as good as eggplant, by the way). And we made loaf after loaf of zucchini bread, good, but enough was enough. After I filled our freezer with loaves, my father-in-law came over proudly with his basket of freshly-picked zucchini, and it was difficult to show enthusiasm and gratitude.

Winter squash, on the other hand, was never wasted and always welcome. Acorn squash, cut and cleaned and filled with honey, brown sugar, and butter was backed with thick pork chops and wrapped in foil to bake for a dinner to remember.

And tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes picked and eaten from the vine. Meaty beefsteaks to make corn, grilled chicken, and potato salad a dinner from Divine Realms.

Any garden wife was familiar with canning and freezing and baking. Won’t even go into detail about that, although there’s great satisfaction in admiring jars of pickles, jams and jellies, tomatoes lined on the countertop after hours of labor.

One summer, Mary, down the street, sent up a box of tomatoes for me when she learned that I canned fresh tomatoes. I was grateful and started in on my usual process of cooking, sterilizing jars, making sure I had lids and seals. What she forgot to tell me was that she’d tried a no-acid tomato. I blissfully poured the cooked tomatoes into waiting jars, sealed, and labeled. Since we’d planned a party that night, I decided to hide the still-warm jars in the overhead cabinets.

A few hours before our guests were expected, after food and drink had been prepared, there was a series of pops and explosions from the kitchen. I ran in to see what happened when the odor of something dead a decade slapped me. From the cupboards, a white ooze dripped on countertops.

The tomatoes had worked and popped their seals, escaping into kitchen freedom. We opened windows, sprayed, ran fans, and tried to remove all evidence of my ignorance, but there was a leftover waft of skunk scent. Never tried those again.

Made delicious tomato jam, though. Had a tart flavor similar to apple butter, and I added some to a Christmas gift of homemade jams and jellies for every man in our families one year. (The grape jelly I made using an old, clean pillow case since I didn’t have cheesecloth.)

I don’t have a garden anymore, and don’t can or freeze. I admire those who do (Erma) and love homemade preserves, bread-and-butter pickles, fresh garden vegetables. I still remember Laurel’s leaf lettuce, planted outside her back porch step, so that every day she stepped out her back door to pluck enough for dinner salad. I was so impressed by that, I used the idea in a story, inspired by her salad garden.

Oh, for a plate of that leaf lettuce now, or tomatoes and corn on the cob, or baked acorn squash.

Even a slice of zucchini bread with freshly-brewed coffee would be welcome.

Just thinking about it makes me hungry.