176 animal, vegetable, miraclemonths of taxing our creativity to feed ourselves locally, we had now
walked onto Easy Street.
The squash- orzo combination is one of several “disappearing squash
recipes” we would come to depend on later in the season. It’s a wonder-
fully filling dish in which the main ingredient is not really all that evident.
Guests and children have eaten it without knowing it contains squash.
The importance of this will soon become clear.
/By mid- month we were getting a dozen tomatoes a day, that many cu-
cumbers, our fi rst eggplants, and squash in unmentionable quantities. A
friend arrived one morning as I was tag- teaming with myself to lug two
full bushel- baskets of produce into the house. He pronounced a biblical
benediction: “The harvest is bountiful and the labors few.”
I agreed, of course, but the truth is I still had to go back to the garden
that morning to pull about two hundred onions—our year’s supply. They
had bulbed up nicely in the long midsummer days and were now waiting
to be tugged out of the ground, cured, and braided into the heavy plaits
that would hang from our kitchen mantel and infuse our meals all through
the winter. I also needed to pull beets that day, pick about a bushel of
green beans, and slip paper plates under two dozen ripening melons to
protect their undersides from moisture and sowbugs. In another week we
would start harvesting these, along with sweet corn, peppers, and okra.
The harvest was bountiful and the labors were blooming endless.
However high the season, it was important for us to remember we
were still just gardeners feeding ourselves and occasional friends, not
commercial farmers growing food as a livelihood. That is a whole differ-
ent set of chores and worries. But in our family’s “Year of Local,” the dis-
tinction did blur for us somewhat. We had other jobs, but when we
committed to the project of feeding ourselves (and reporting, here, the
results), that task became a significant piece of our family livelihood. In-
stead of the normal modern custom of working for money that is con-
stantly exchanged for food, we worked directly for food, skipping all the
middle steps. Basically this was about efficiency, I told myself—and I still