Around this time of year, on a normal year, our front entry-way and kitchen are overflowing with goodness. Even if you somehow managed to walk through with your eyes closed, your nose would alert you to the treasures. Buckets and baskets and pails overflowing. Towering piles and packed shelves. Plums and apples and tomatoes and zucchini... Winter squash and pumpkins... Onions. Carrots. Beets. A runaway tomato or three wherever they'd landed.
This year. Not so much. Not much at all.
And I'm nowhere near ready to admit defeat. Not yet. Summer was too short.
I marched into my favorite thrift store with two littles. We were on a mission. I steered them straight toward the big shelf on the west wall. SCORE! We walked out minus a twenty dollar bill, arms loaded with queen and king sized blankets.
Quite frankly, I felt like we'd won the lottery.
Want to know why?
If you visit a thrift store in search of a specific item, you will rarely find it. It's just one of the unspoken rules of thrifting. You have to get lucky. Not only did we find exactly what we wanted, in mass quantities... one of us narrowly avoided toppling a huge top-heavy display of colorful beaded necklaces. Read as: Mom ruined all her fun just at the exact moment it mattered.
Are you feeling my joy yet?
It didn't last long.
I was single-parenting it for the night. By the time I got everyone in bed, I figured I would have two hours at most before it was completely dark out. Two hours should have been adequate to do some judicious harvesting and tuck the more delicate things in for the night.
And then I fell asleep with the Bean.
I ended up with an hour to get the job done. I couldn't really see what I was doing, but I did it anyway. With my twenty dollars worth of second-hand blankets that still reeked of dryer sheets, fifteen clothespins, a couple of good sized rocks for weights and two upside down pots. Fingers crossed.
And sure enough. That was it.
Besides our wimpy pumpkin plant, which I had promised our boys I would try to save, even though I'm pretty sure the pumpkins won't be ripe until December, and I really have no idea how to make that happen...
My main priority had been to save these:
And these:
Ummm... did you see that? I grew a red pepper. Red. Five of them, actually. This is a minor miracle. And no, they're just barely almost not quite ready to be picked yet. Or maybe I'm not ready to pick them.
Hello my pretties. So glad to see you survived the night.
Tonight?
Round two.
Our forecasted low is lower.
Fingers crossed.
12 comments:
Thank you Jess! I felt like a crazy garden lady tonight moving what I could into the garage, laying blankets and towels over what I could. Between this, my daily trips and turns of the compost pile, and the hornworm distance throwing merit badge I seem to be working on I'm sure the folks in the 1/2 million dollar home behind us think I'm a complete wackadoodle.
LOVE your comment Molly! Let's start a club. Who else wants to join?
I'M NOT READY!!!!
Summers not over, is it??? I don't know how that happened... it just whizzed by!
The melons and peppers look amazing, but what I noticed were your morning glories. You got them to grow! :)
Good luck keeping your garden warm.
We've got warnings for tonight... must cover my pepper plants.
Well good luck with that - you're right about the thrift shopping. It's the thrill of the hunt!
Oh what a lovely garden! I’m glad you were able to get things covered! I am the same way about my peppers and produce, they’re “just barely almost not quite ready to be picked” for as long as possible! I just love looking at all of the colors in the garden! Plus, once they come inside, it means I have some major work to do processing them. :-)
Do you have a headlamp Jess? I bought one last winter for skiing/snowshoeing in the dark but I used it in my scramble to cover up the garden the other night and it was sooooo handy!
Congrats on the red peppers! What variety of melon did you grow?
I think we got shortchanged on the growing season this year! Fall is here far too soon...
Loving your photos!
uh huh.
I bring my herb planter inside every single night. ahem.
Yes, it is on the small scale of your FANTASTIC garden.
Ahem.
but still.
I know what you mean.
Oh I feel your pain! We've been playing that dance with two long sheets of plastic and odd assortments of sticks, logs, bricks and clothespins. All to save our pathetic "garden" and the self-planted squash & pumpkins. lol
All these comments are hilarious!
I hope you got those peppers picked before the next night came! And they are gorgeous! The problem with giving my girl a pail and sending her out to the garden is that she picked most of the peppers a bit prematurely (even if she ate a lot of them like an apple right out in the garden).
And melon. Did they get ripe enough of did the frost claim them? They've always rotted on me; I've never succesfully grown them.
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