Dave Wood

As she does every spring, the Beautiful Wife sternly laid down new rules regarding garden expanse long before the frost appeared on our lone pumpkin:

“This year we’ve got to stop this garden madness that has damaged our happy home this past half century. Year after year we spend too much of our precious time planting vegetables we either never use--like Scotch Bonnet peppers—or on vegetables we love to eat like yellow crookneck summer squash, which normally bears one anemic crookneck and then dies of mold, while the tasteless zucchini flourishes beyond reason….”

“And what is the alternative, my Darling?” ask I.”

“Let’s just plant produce we know we can use and never overplant tomatoes like we did in 1985 when we ended up with so many tomatoes we had to make ketchup, which required 3 bushels to make one ten-ounce bottle, when we both know nothing beats Heinz!”

“So what’s on your list, O Maid of our Horn of Plenty?’’

She fired away: “Tomatoes: Romas and Better Boys, Bib lettuce, basil for pesto, thyme and sage for roasts, scallions that will turn into big yellow onions, bell peppers for shish kebabs….”

 “No parsnips?” I ventured.

“Good grief, No! They don’t get big enough in time for Thanksgiving! And we only use one or two which are always available at farmers’ markets. It’s best to leave exotics like parsnips and eggplants up to professionals like John Galgowski. Those folks really know their onions as they say back home.”

So it was settled. No more stuffing that darned old horn of plenty with bursting plants.

So the die was cast and we looked into the future clear-eyed and practical until the day it finally rained and we decided to take a trip home to Whitehall, which is unfortunately blessed with an Eden-like plethora of Amish-run farmers’ markets from Rat to Ervin to Poker coulee. If you spot a buggy in the farmyard, there’s probably a greenhouse hiding behind a crumbling old unpainted tobacco shed. 

And thus, we were lured into the Proverbial Garden of Eden, where “Eve” Wood succumbed to the lure of more than just an apple. B.W. left our shiny Toyota Camry, tripped over the tongue of Menno Lambrecht’s wonderful one-horse shay, entered his own little Eden of plenitude, and returned laden with a sack of Kennebec seed potatoes, Burpee packets of three varieties of Kohl Rabi seeds, one pack of Crookneck yellow squash, one pack of Straightneck yellow (“Maybe they will perform better,” she pluckily explained), a packet of Green Lake bush beans, one of Kentucky Wonder pole beans and….

You get the idea: it’s “Here we go again ..”