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.

Mulberry Jam

One Saturday in late April, Caroline and Iain and I were walking back from somewhere - probably Alon's or the Farmer's Market - and Caroline noticed the mulberries on the tree in Vita and Alex's yard.  She told us that she'd never known mulberries were edible, til one day when - as part of a school-organized field trip - she and some classmates and their advisor had spent the day riding MARTA and visiting local sites in Atlanta.  Somewhere they had come upon a mulberry tree, and her advisor picked some berries and ate them. 

We talked about making mulberry jam.  It seemed like it might be fun to do, even if it wasn't very good.  When I got home, I found a recipe on line, and emailed Vita and asked if it was okay if we picked some mulberries.  She said yes, and I bought some jars and pectin (we had plenty of sugar), but then I left town for a trip and we didn't get any made that weekend.

It wasn't til a couple of weeks later, on Mother's Day, that Iain and I walked up the street with a metal colander and picked what I guessed to be a quart of mulberries.  They were beautiful, I thought, so I took a picture of them:

Each berry had tightly attached to it a quarter-inch-long green stem.  In the instructions with the on line recipe I'd found, the writer said it was too much trouble to take off the stems, but I cut them off with scissors as I sorted the berries.

I washed and sterilized the jars and then started on the jam.  It didn't seem possible that the jam could boil - the recipe just called for berries and sugar and a little bit of lemon juice - but it did, and at some point something magic happened and it suddenly turned translucent and a beautiful claret color.  It was, I think, the most beautiful jam I'd ever seen. 

It also was, quite possibly, the best jam we'd ever had.  It was delicious!  I left a jar for Vita and Alex, and gave one to my friend Karen when she was in town.  Now we have about half a jar left, of the six half-pints that we made that day.  I was hoping that we could make another batch, but Caroline and I walked by the tree earlier this morning, and there are no more mulberries.

She is sitting at the dining room table across from me, now, eading the New York Times and eating wild plums that we just got at the Farmer's Market.  No more mulberry jam til  next year.  We'll just have to make do, somehow.