A good year for gardens

I have often heard stories about families who put away hundreds of quarts of tomatoes, an equal amount of peaches, and pint after pint of string beans, carrots and corn. And while my garden is abundant and serves to feed us for the better part of six months, with a bit preserved for the winter and enough to give away, I have never really considered myself a serious gardener.

My preserving is more like three bags of broccoli, a dozen or so pints of pickles for presents at Christmas and an equal amount of frozen butternut squash as is stored in the basement for winter use.

But as the harvest continues to come and I find myself drying tomatoes, making pesto, ratatouille, tomato sauce, albeit three or four quarts at a time, my perspective of whether I am preserving an abundance of food is replaced with the sheer attention to making sure that nothing goes to waste.

And in the process, I am finding that we are packing away a fair amount of food. All of which I find reassuring somehow.

Stephen and I went at the grocery store on Sunday, following the Fellowship service, to buy canning jars, among other things. We picked up several jars of spaghetti sauce; they were on sale for $1.

I spent some time when we got home picking, cutting and boiling our Roma tomatoes. Today, I put them through a food mill, diced up onions, garlic and green peppers, and cooked it down for several hours. Adding fresh herbs this afternoon, when it as all said and done, I had created two and a half quarts of spaghetti sauce, which I froze.

I’m tempted to think that I could have simply bought three more jars on Sunday, spent three bucks, and been done with it. But I know, in my heart of hearts now more than ever, that the quality of our lives are not measured by the amount of cheap goods that we can purchase.

The quality of our lives, it seems, is measured by whether we are in harmony with our intention. My intention is to live as closely to the earth and its abundance as possible. And to that end, every yellow squash that gets grated and frozen for squash pizza or every quart of vegetable broth that gets created as a stock for rice, soup or stew is one more step in the intention that the earth and our activities on it will sustain us moving forward.

Some might call it my theology of hope. Some might simply say it was a good year for gardens.