Harvest

My father was a wonderful gardener. When we lived in Kansas, we had a large garden and he grew corn, tomatoes, cantaloupes, watermelons, boysenberries, cucumbers, and lettuce. There was rich soil, and full sun, and a well my father dug. When we moved to Woodward, we joked about the small back yard that was almost completely covered with a concrete patio; he said he didn't want a big garden anymore, that it was too much work. But he couldn't stand it; he ended up taking out part of the driveway with a sledge hammer and planting tomatoes.

I, on the other hand, am not much of a gardener, although I keep making these ineffectual attempts. At the beginning of the summer, I bought some lettuce plants at the farmers' market. I set them in the bed in the front yard and forgot about them; by the time I remembered, they were dried up and dead. The strawberries in the front bed - descendants of plants placed there a few years ago - did produce some wonderfully sweet strawberries early in the summer but as soon as the squirrels found them, they disappeared as soon as they started to ripen. The blueberries disappeared and so did the few blackberries on our new blackberry bush. I planted some heirloom tomatoes but got not a single tomato off of them. If we were responsible for producing our own food, we'd have to live on squirrel and mulberry jam.

There's one exception, though, to my amazing failure to grow anything edible. A couple of years ago, Iain and I were at Pike's and we bought a small lemon tree. The tree was in a pot, small enough it could be easily moved; it reminded me of the orange tree my dad used to have in my parents' kitchen. So we set it out in the front yard, in front of our house, and there it  bloomed, and made some small green fruit, but the small lemons it made ended up all falling off. The tree ended up spending the first winter on Kathy and Steve's porch and when I got it back in the spring it had lost all its leaves. The leaves grew back, and it bloomed several more times, with wonderfully fragrant blossoms, but it didn't make any lemons. It spent last winter in our foyer.

But this year after it bloomed the little lemons didn't fall off, and they grew to be lemon-sized.  They stayed green for month after month, and I didn't think they were ever going to ripen (maybe they had heard what happens to ripening fruit in our yard).  But then they turned yellow, and suddenly we had real lemons.



Last night, right after I look this picture, we picked them. They are beautiful.



I told Iain I think we need to make something special with them.  Maybe we'll make a lemon tart and some marmalade.  But definitely something special, with these glorious bright yellow lemons.