When it comes to making dinner, there is nothing more satisfying than using fresh produce from your yard and your neighbor’s yard. It brings inside the taste of the outdoors, and reminds us of how our food is grown.
Years ago, I cultivated a larger backyard garden and planted peas, broccoli, green beans, tomatoes, peppers, carrots and eggplant. I spent time in the kitchen making ratatouille, and freezing fresh beans and Brussel sprouts to eat on Thanksgiving Day.
Life got busy and complicated, and the backyard vegetable garden became a miniature — very miniature — prairie.
But several years ago, I realized how much I’ve been missing the satisfaction of growing food outdoors. So I bought two raised garden beds made of cedar and placed them in the sunniest spot in the yard. Since then, I’ve been growing peppers, lettuces, spinach and sometimes carrots.
Lettuce and spinach are early crops. You can plant them even before the last frost in spring, and by June I’m picking fresh greens nearly every day for salads and to put on sandwiches. Later, as it gets hotter, the greens bolt and start producing flowers and seeds.
My lettuce is now bolting, and a sunflower is actually blooming among the long, spindly plants. Typically, I toss the bolted greens somewhere in the yard and hope a rabbit will find them, but a friend said she saves the seeds and plants them the following year. I’m going to try that.
But right now, we’re harvesting peppers. My husband loves hot peppers. I prefer milder ones, and this year I spaced them out from extremely hot to mild. On one end are jalapeños; on the other end, golden bell peppers are growing.
I visit my vegetable garden nearly daily and have watched the blooms of the bell peppers become tiny green fruits, growing bigger and greener, and then turning yellow as summer progresses. It’s a much more pleasurable experience than shopping for peppers that all look the same in the grocery store.
More Top Picks Best Cross Training Shoes
My peppers aren’t perfectly shaped, and there’s still a bit of green on one of them, but they are lovely and delicious when sautéed with onions and potatoes.
My neighbor recently gave me three large red tomatoes he had grown, and scores of tiny little yellow tomatoes you can pop into your mouth. Anyone who has eaten a tomato picked fresh from the vine knows just how incredibly sweet and remarkable it tastes.
Tomatoes, once called wolf peaches or gold apples, grew in the wild in the Andes Mountains where indigenous peoples cultivated them and introduced them to Mexico and Central America. By the mid-1500s, Italians began cooking with tomatoes, but in many other places in Europe they were used as ornamental plants.
The French, of course, called the tomato pomme d’amour or love apple, thinking eating it kindled feelings of love.
After savoring the taste of a small slice of tomato, I put the rest into a large frying pan with some olive oil, onions and peppers from the garden. As the vegetables simmered into a rather thick luscious sauce, the fragrance filled my senses and I felt as if I were romping outdoors in a field of blooms.
Before enjoying the homemade pasta sauce on spinach and tomato rigatoni, I went outside to watch nighthawks and dragonflies catching insects in the air as dusk approached. Common nighthawks, which aren’t hawks at all, but closely related to whippoorwills, start migrating through our region in mid-August, heading toward their winter home in the Amazon Basin, and Cerrado grassland and savanna regions of Brazil, where they arrive in mid-November.
They must find food all along the way during their 4,000 miles or longer journey. Flying in the sky and snatching insects is what they do, and always have done, to get food.
Humans have made big changes on how they obtain food, and by growing and harvesting my own, I feel a bit more connected to Earth and the natural order of things.
Sheryl DeVore has worked as a full-time and freelance reporter, editor and photographer for the baiduhai and its subsidiaries. She’s the author of several books on nature and the environment. Send story ideas and thoughts to [email protected].