Reporter's Reflections Archive

I think most everyone has their own “fresh from the garden” favorite, the one vegetable (or fruit) that has a taste as fresh as the first day of summer. Some prefer tomatoes--fried green, sliced on a sandwich, stewed with biscuits. Some, like Frank, just eat them like an apple. Others sit and wait for new potatoes, raked out from along the edge of the row, then boiled, with butter.

My favorite is baby cucumbers. I had my first for the season this past weekend, and they were just divine.

 I think sadly about families or children who can’t identify with what I am saying, because they have only tasted the mass-produced, hormone-injected produce available at most grocery stores. They have no concept of “fresh from the garden” because they have been convinced that store-bought produce is “garden fresh.” A rose may still be a rose by any other name, but a store-bought cucumber is not a cucumber. Comparing home-grown produce to today’s “frankenfoods” is like, well . . . like comparing apples and oranges.

 Several years ago, I purchased a tomato at the store, only to get home to find fresh ones ready and waiting in the garden. I placed the store-bought tomato on the kitchen window sill to “ripen” and used the garden tomatoes in my cooking for a while. As I washed dishes each day, I looked at the store-bought tomato in the window sill. After two weeks, it looked as fresh and red as the day I bought it. Tomatoes picked from the garden days before were already going soft, but the tomato from the store was firm, and round.

 I decided to do a test. How long will that tomato look that way?

 It was two months, three weeks, and four days before I finally gave up and threw the tomato away--and it was still firm, and red. What do they do to a tomato to make it do such a thing? They inject them with pig hormones, color them, radiate them, and coat them in fine wax. Sounds appetizing doesn’t it? This is why the term “frankenfoods” came to exist.

 Yes, this past weekend, as Frank rounded the hay fields cutting, kicking, racking and baling, I thought I would peek in the cucumber bed. I found lots of blooms, and saw that cucumbers will be plentiful this year, but I was a few days early. Only three cucumbers had managed to reach the edible stage. I plucked them from the vine and took them to the kitchen where I laid them on the counter to wait for dinner.

 Of course, as I walked by them over the next hour, I found I could not wait. So I peeled one and salted it, and ate it with my fingers on the back porch as I watched a doe and her fawn bound across raked rows of hay. It was one of those perfect summer moments that you hope to remember forever. To make the moment last longer, I peeled and ate a second cucumber, which only left one for dinner.

“One cucumber is not enough for dinner,” I thought, and so I ate it too.

 Later that evening, as Frank sat down for dinner, he looked at the table. Bread, spaghetti, salad, and milk.

 “I saw you in the garden,” he said, “are there any cucumbers?”

 “Um,” I said, “they’re not quite ready yet.”