Daily Notes- August 24th

Finally Saturday.

Garden News-- one of the Grow Box purchased support systems collapsed and there were green tomatoes rolling all over the driveway.  I collected them and placed them on a flat surface in the vestibule.  A Hail Mary.  They are too green to actually ripen.

I have eaten fried green tomatoes.  I did live in Georgia for the formative years of being a wife and mother (the first 6).  The pregnant teenage wife in the apartment across the hall taught me how to make fried yellow squash and fried green tomatoes.  And fried okra-- a deep and abiding favorite of mine.  This is widely known as "the vegetable plate".  Served with a buttered wedge of cornbread.

So opportunity knocks so to speak.  I have like 50 green tomatoes.  It's been warm, hot, humid this Maine Summer and still....the tomatoes have grown but haven't gotten ripe.  We are eating them as they ripen.  I have four in the vestibule destined for our supper table tonight.  With sweet corn.

I might have to give in to G's wanting to set up the hoop house next summer.  Tomatoes will ripen in that.  But we will need to hire help to do the set up which will be intense.  Rail road ties, rebar, etc. Like a FULL ON PROJECT.  And the raised beds in the garden will need to be taken apart and emptied of soil. this might have been something I could do two years ago--but I am no longer able bodied.

I realized, yesterday, when I wrote I was 72.5 that I am actually 72.11.  Less than a month from my 73rd birthday.  Getting too old for all this changing things around.  I hardly get down to the fenced garden anymore--just to pick blueberries.  And rhubarb in the Spring.  I am more of an age to go to the Farmer's Market and buy what I need.  I have enough bread and butter pickles "put up"--- how I love that old expression.

The peaches aren't ripe yet-- plums are still hard.  But in today's local paper a woman wrote of the peach kuchen that her Austrian grandmother made with any fruit that was ripe.  The author was waiting to make it with peaches.  There is a custard and a crunchy topping.  I remember that from childhood.  My grandmother was an immigrant from Austria-Hungary in the late 1800's.  So I clipped the recipe and will also be waiting for the peaches to ripen.  The author's crust is more like American pie crust and my grandmother in her many years in America- never made a pie.  Her crust was more likely yeast dough.  Apple, peach, plum.  But the custard and the crumbly crunchy topping is the same.