Too Much, Too Little

“You’ll get yer supper when all them peas are shelled, dammit!”

I want to clarify something in yesterday’s post that contradicts some of my prior blather. Yesterday, I wrote that we produce a surplus of almost all our food stuffs, whilst in the past I’ve waxed ad nauseam-poetic about how perfectly delightful it is to run out of certain things, if only for the blossoming joy and gratitude of their sweet return as small winged angels (is winged angels an oxymoron? I think so…) pluck harps of gold. Or some gushy shite like that.

Truth is, both are correct. We do produce a surplus of almost all our food stuffs and we do run out of many items on a regular basis, even those which we produce in excess. Now, I know what yer thinking: The dude’s a confessed high school dropout and furthermore admits to knowing all the lyrics to Holy Diver. He ain’t exactly the swiftest piglet in the litter. Alas, such is true. But it’s also true that I mean what I say. Surplus and shortage. Of the very same items.

How can it be so? It can be so because we do not expect to have access to everything we produce on a full-time, year-round basis. In part, this is because we simply can’t store many of our crops long enough to ensure a constant supply. For instance, whatever potatoes remain generally start going soft sometime in late April. Ditto onions and other root crops. Garlic. And so on. In other cases, we actually plan for an annual break precisely because of all those gushy reasons above. For instance, although we put up 100 or more quarts of blueberries, we generally run dry in spring or early summer. Truth is, we could put up even more berries. We could ensure perpetual face-stuffing. Easy-peasy.

But as I’ve mentioned before, if we never ran out, what fun would it be to watch the season’s first berries ripening on the vine, checking them every morning when I saunter down the field to move the cows to their day paddock? What fun would it be to carry the first handful back to the house in my grubby, calloused palm and split them amongst the four of us (minus the other handful I greedily scarfed right there, in the patch) ? What fun would it be to roll those little orbs around in our mouths for a minute, sucking the blue sweetness right out of them, heads tilted just a bit. the better to hear those angel-plucked harps? Why, listen, son: I think they’re playing our song!

So instead, once we have our 100 or so quarts put up and once we’ve had our fill of fresh berries and picking the skins out of one another’s teeth and listening to the angels, we open our patch to a handful of friends for you-pick. We get a little mad money and we get to run out of berries. It’s a win-win, really.

Of course, there are certain foods we try to never run short of, simply because they’re too fundamental to our day-in, day-out gustatory habits. Butter, sausage, and eggs come to mind. Kimchi or some sort of fermented vegetable (yo, Doug, I’ll post our recipe soon!). And we always, always have meat in the freezer, be it piggie, sheepie, cowsie, or one variety of poultry or another. This is maybe stating the obvious, but those adhering to plant-based diets don’t last too ’round these parts.

Anyway. Surplus and shortage. Too much, too little. It’s worth planning for both.