It's a good old song by Robbie Robertson, the last track on side 2 of The Band, circa 1972-ish, and it seems appropriate for Labor Day.
I work for the union cause she so good to me,
And I'm bound to come out on top because that's where she says I should be...
Born in the fields, listen to the rice when the wind blows cross the water
King Harvest has surely come.
There's a small basket of tomatoes and peppers on the kitchen table. I've been picking them for a few weeks and leaving them on a sawhorse out by the garden. Pick a few, let the sun and rain ripen and wash them off, and occasionally cut up a pepper to put in the bean soup. But as time passes, ripeness turns to rot, so I decided on a glorious clear Friday morning before Labor Day to take action.
I enjoy the visual spectacle of watching things decay as much as the next person. Apples wrinkle up like old people; potatoes collapse inward and sprout eyes; beans dry out into papery pods containing next year's seeds; cayenne peppers curl up in raucous contorsions under their little green hats. But I don't have much use for the fruit flies hovering around the overripe tomatoes and jalapenos that are starting to go soft, so I'd better do something with this stuff.
This morning more spots of bright red appeared in the back corner of the yard, announcing their readiness as I sipped my coffee in the Adirondack chair. I guess the rain Katrina blew our way last week perked things up after a short dry spell. So in spite of a perfect day to be outside, I resolve to spend the time indoors tha's needed to turn some of that bounty into salsa before it goes bad. Some of it will anyway, or already has, and it becomes compost. I like that - throwing nothing away.
First I wash what's been picked and put the cheerful little devils on the kitchen table to dry. Small red chilis, plump green jalapenos, long red cayennes, shiny dark purple sweet peppers, bright orange habaneros, and three kinds of tomatoes - some smooth and round, some wide and deeply creased like tiny pumpkins. It starts to look like some horticultural mosaic by Bosch or Breughel as I artfully arrange them in little groups on the octagonal table.
But one thing leads to another, and after I emptied the compost bucket to make room for more, I found myself dismantling the old heap by the garden, a year's worth of kitchen discards, layered with newspaper and weeds from the yard. So I spent some time forking out big clumps of decomposed stuff into an extended raised bed in the sunny back corner, doubling the size of the part of the garden where the bugs ate all the pole beans - better luck next year. The wooden timbers that held the compost together will make solid edges of those beds, and the bottom of the old heap is now nice, crumbly organic soil ready to sit for six or eight months before something else gets planted in it. Thus goes the semiannual ritual conversion of old into new, destruction and creation, amen, the second day of the ninth month has come to pass, and it was good.
While I was out there creating and destroying like some sunburnt suburban brahma-vishnu-shiva wannabe, I got the urge to put up new sides for the new compost, and the lumber was right there, 2x3s leftover from fence materials , so I cut a couple to make an isoceles equilateral triangle, and 12 triangles later it stacked up pretty well. By that time it was too late to make salsa.
So it wasn't until the next day, Saturday, that I got around to frying onions and peppers in an iron skillet, adding cut-up tomatoes, turn off the heat, and let it sit. One batch to eat, one to freeze for later. The next batch might be those little red chilis that don't dry so well, or maybe I should learn how to pickle.
I work for the union cause she so good to me,
And I'm bound to come out on top because that's where she says I should be...
Born in the fields, listen to the rice when the wind blows cross the water
King Harvest has surely come.
There's a small basket of tomatoes and peppers on the kitchen table. I've been picking them for a few weeks and leaving them on a sawhorse out by the garden. Pick a few, let the sun and rain ripen and wash them off, and occasionally cut up a pepper to put in the bean soup. But as time passes, ripeness turns to rot, so I decided on a glorious clear Friday morning before Labor Day to take action.
I enjoy the visual spectacle of watching things decay as much as the next person. Apples wrinkle up like old people; potatoes collapse inward and sprout eyes; beans dry out into papery pods containing next year's seeds; cayenne peppers curl up in raucous contorsions under their little green hats. But I don't have much use for the fruit flies hovering around the overripe tomatoes and jalapenos that are starting to go soft, so I'd better do something with this stuff.
This morning more spots of bright red appeared in the back corner of the yard, announcing their readiness as I sipped my coffee in the Adirondack chair. I guess the rain Katrina blew our way last week perked things up after a short dry spell. So in spite of a perfect day to be outside, I resolve to spend the time indoors tha's needed to turn some of that bounty into salsa before it goes bad. Some of it will anyway, or already has, and it becomes compost. I like that - throwing nothing away.
First I wash what's been picked and put the cheerful little devils on the kitchen table to dry. Small red chilis, plump green jalapenos, long red cayennes, shiny dark purple sweet peppers, bright orange habaneros, and three kinds of tomatoes - some smooth and round, some wide and deeply creased like tiny pumpkins. It starts to look like some horticultural mosaic by Bosch or Breughel as I artfully arrange them in little groups on the octagonal table.
But one thing leads to another, and after I emptied the compost bucket to make room for more, I found myself dismantling the old heap by the garden, a year's worth of kitchen discards, layered with newspaper and weeds from the yard. So I spent some time forking out big clumps of decomposed stuff into an extended raised bed in the sunny back corner, doubling the size of the part of the garden where the bugs ate all the pole beans - better luck next year. The wooden timbers that held the compost together will make solid edges of those beds, and the bottom of the old heap is now nice, crumbly organic soil ready to sit for six or eight months before something else gets planted in it. Thus goes the semiannual ritual conversion of old into new, destruction and creation, amen, the second day of the ninth month has come to pass, and it was good.
While I was out there creating and destroying like some sunburnt suburban brahma-vishnu-shiva wannabe, I got the urge to put up new sides for the new compost, and the lumber was right there, 2x3s leftover from fence materials , so I cut a couple to make an isoceles equilateral triangle, and 12 triangles later it stacked up pretty well. By that time it was too late to make salsa.
So it wasn't until the next day, Saturday, that I got around to frying onions and peppers in an iron skillet, adding cut-up tomatoes, turn off the heat, and let it sit. One batch to eat, one to freeze for later. The next batch might be those little red chilis that don't dry so well, or maybe I should learn how to pickle.
1 comment:
Thanks, JC, I'll try it!
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