COMMENTARY: $200 Yields a Ton for Fresh Food, Plus Pride and Satisfaction
Donnie is up to his ears in corn, okra, potatoes, beans, and varmints.
By Donnie Johnston
COLUMNIST
The harvesting continues.
Right now I am picking and freezing corn, some on the cob and some cut off, trying to beat the coons, the groundhogs and the crows to the punch.
My early crop of peaches and cream corn has been exceptional, helped along by perfectly spaced rains. Thankfully, we have missed the destructive gully washers that have plagued some parts of the area.
I’m trying something new with some of my ear corn this year, freezing it in vacuum-sealed bags with pats of butter already added. I saw this process on the internet and a friend convinced me to try it. When you want to eat it, you just put the whole bag in boiling water and when you open it you have corn that is already buttered. We’ll see how it works.
I am also freezing okra, one of my favorite foods. This stuff is tricky to freeze because if you don’t do it right it comes out slimy.
I use a friend’s method, washing and cutting the okra, breading it with cornmeal, placing it on a cookie sheet and baking it for 10 minutes at 350 degrees (a little oil on the sheet). Then I turn it over and bake another 10 minutes.
I place the amount I usually eat (no one else likes it) in a sandwich bag and place several sandwich bags in a quart freezer bag. I can take out one small bag at a time, brown the okra slightly and it is ready to eat.
My tomatoes are late this year. I’ve been eating tomato sandwiches since July 6, but they’re not ripening in canning quantities yet. That’s just as well because now I have the corn to deal with.
I canned 103 quarts and 10 pints of green beans and froze several more quarts. After that I allowed a friend to pick and can what was left. I still have a row of beans that I am eating on, but 113 cans is enough for my family and me.
I froze about a dozen quart bags of squash, canned and pickled about 15 quarts of beets and made enough kraut to grace my hotdogs another year.
I finished digging my potatoes last week and made a bumper crop. Good, cool spring weather that was perfect for spuds.
The cantaloupes are starting to ripen and the watermelons, both Charleston Gray and Crimson Sweet, are looking great. Now if I can keep the varmints out of both patches.
I have one more small patch of late corn (I planted three rows where the early peas were) and some sweet potatoes to dig in September. That will about finish this season’s gardening.
Overall, this garden has been one of my best. No late frosts, nicely spaced rains and no prolonged heatwaves.
Counting the watermelons, I will have grown over a ton of produce this season. That’s a lot of food. My costs – seeds, fertilizer and fuel? A little over $200. That’s roughly 10 cents a pound for enough fresh produce for four months and enough canned and frozen produce to last four families for another eight months.
If you can buy it cheaper than that at the store (the excuse most people give for not planting a garden), I want to see it.
From early March to early August, I will average less than one hour a day in my garden, the trick being to maintain weed control on a daily basis.
While some folks are paying to get their workouts at a health club, I get my exercise for free, walking behind a plow or chopping with a hoe.
No, I don’t exercise in an air-conditioned space, and I have to worry about animals and weather, but I also get the satisfaction of knowing that I have accomplished something.
Gardening doesn’t take a lot of time and it doesn’t take a lot of money. What it does take is determination and commitment, being out there every day to stay on top of things, even if it is for 15 minutes.
When I see my children and my grandchildren eating healthy food that I have raised, all my work is worth it.
And when I sit down to a winter meal that I sweated over six months earlier, that food tastes better than anything I could have bought at the store.
It is called pride and personal satisfaction.
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