Confessions of a Gardener

This was 3 years ago, but my thoughts exactly.

First things first. If gardeners are people who make food grow, I'm really not a gardener even though I have a garden plot.
Every year I fight my soil to produce anything. When I am successful at all, I  have to sneak my produce out of the jaws of my crop-eating garden before it randomly kills off something else.  Last year it killed my tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and every flower in the flower bed.  This year it was my corn.  

I think gardens are beautiful.
Especially gardens that are well-kept and look like a dream, all mulched and lovely like my friend Gail's. I've already seen my own garden looking beautiful, but that was in winter when it was buried under three feet of snow.

"If our livelihood depended upon our garden," my husband began, and I took the liberty to help him finish his thought, "we'd be destitute street urchins living in a cardboard box on a street corner."
We wouldn't be if we could grow things.  But that conversation occurred this morning while we were picking our second planting of corn. (The first planting died in perfect growing conditions when it was knee-high.  Our produce-farming neighbors hadn't seen anything like it.)  So we replanted. These five rows of corn should have easily produced enough corn for a family of our size for at least one year, possibly two.  We got a grand total of nine bags of corn for the freezer.  Nine.  If it weren't for my husband's day job, I'd be up in the attic picking out my box.

I love knowing exactly what wholesome things are in all my home-canned products, from chili soup to fruit danish.
But I work hard to get there, thanks to my pressure canner.  My history with pressure canners has been fraught with frustrations. The first one I had was in cahoots with our garden in destroying our produce and would build pressure up just high enough to cook my food but not high enough to safely can the stuff.  So I'd have to re-can with all fingers crossed.

Sensibly, after years of overcooked food, I got a new canner, in spite of the guys at the recycling plant who tried to talk us out of recycling the old one.  The new one wasn't supposed to jingle unless it reached 15 lbs of pressure or more.  The first time I used it, the gauge never winked, blinked, or moved a muscle but stayed entirely expressionless while all indicators told me I had a time bomb in my kitchen. My no-jingle canner was jingling hard and the safety valve stood tall at attention.  This is the same canner that, with a new gauge on a later date, was screaming like a fire alarm for no good reason while I had my wide-eyed children sheltered behind a wide-eyed-me on the other side of the kitchen for safety purposes.  How do I even find canners like this anyway?

Currently, I'm all for supporting local economy.
This morning in the corn patch while we picked a stunted cob off of every fourth stalk (the other 3 stalks had no corn at all) and harvested enough bugs to give our son a head start in entomology, we decided that maybe we should take a break from gardening for a few years and be the ones to support local farmers. 

Lord willing, we'll garden again.  Someday when the children are grown up enough to not be wailing at the end of my bean rows while I pick and actually need the responsibility and experience of a garden.  Or someday when our family is big enough that $4 of tomatoes no longer lasts a whole winter. 

Or maybe today is simply a bad day to talk about it.  Nine bags of corn?  At least it fits into my freezer nicely; I was worried about that.