How to avoid drowning

in vegetables

I know it’s August when I start to feel like I’m drowning.

I’m mowing by the garden and the cucumbers I missed yesterday peek out from under their leaves and smirk at me, so after I put away the mower I go pick them.

I though there were only a few, but as happens with cucumbers, there were more than I thought and a few monsters.

I don’t know where they came from.

I try to figure out a way to carry them, but it’s a tight squeeze\juggling act.

I really should have gotten a colander, I’m thinking, when I notice that the cantaloupes that I accidentally planted at the end of the cuke row, thinking they were actually, you know, cucumbers, have turned yellow.

They slip from the stems! YES! READY!!!

I add them to the precarious stack and totter carefully in to the house.

On the way in, I notice the peppers.

So after a celebratory Tasting of the First Cantaloupe, I ask my 4 year old to help and we go out and collect a bowl and a half full. But the paste tomatoes are also turning red, so we go get more bowls.

The kitchen table already is covered with half a bushel of beans that my 12 year old picked this morning, since she didn’t quite finish the beans yesterday.

Also there is a pot of elderberries that the kids picked this morning needing to be removed from the stems.

I go back out to get the cherry tomatoes.

It’s gorgeous. It’s just that. . . what do you do with it all?!?

I feel the panic rise, but no, not doing that. This is a gift.

We have a quick lunch. We do not sit around the table. It is covered with vegetables.

I’m taking a permaculture design course, so I get some chicken broth canning in the pressure canner (yes, I am trying to empty the freezer of chicken broth parts, if you must know) and then grab the elderberries and go watch my recorded Zoom videos.

I really wish I could be there in person. But besides the multicolored tide which I am attempting to stem, there is a certain small person or five that need me pretty much right now. And I’m learning a lot even though I can’t actually be there.

When the elderberries are free and drying in the dehydrator, I move to the kitchen table and work on beans- stems off, chopped in pieces, blanched, frozen.

Then I move to pickling a bunch of peppers while encouraging my daughter’s pen and ink project for the fair and demonstrating some techniques for her.

There’s a long break when the first batch of broth is done and I need to get the second one going. There is also a small person who wants to cuddle and read a story and talk about the things he can name. They aren’t many but what he lacks in vocabulary he makes up for in repetition.

When I get back my daughter is making supper (she chose this night) and I realize I need to not try to do quite so much on the stove top or I’ll get frustrated. So the third batch of broth waits.

After supper I need to get out, but there are two batches of things needing a little extra time- the peppers and the other batch of broth.

So it’s dark by the time I go look at the cows and the sheep that I helped move together earlier today, before this all started. They seem to have gotten over the initial, “Hello, who are you-AAAHHH!!! YOU JUMPED! AAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!” (runs frantically around the pasture.) If running them together works, this will be such a time saver!

I go for a walk and come back to the tomatoes still on the kitchen table and the third batch of broth bubbling on the stove.

It’s ok.

Little bits at a time, finish them completely and keep moving.

August ends.

When I first started this, I didn’t know that August ends and with it the feeling of drowning.

But it does, and now I don’t panic so much when it hits. I even kind of enjoy it.

Because you don’t actually drown, and when else would you even have the option of swimming in vegetables?

It’s frightening at first, but it really is a good time of year.