Joy had seen this coming for a few weeks now, but I was in denial: the tomato plants, which were so stunted and got off to a late start, just weren’t going to ripen before the first frost. We actually already had one frost over a week ago, but it was light and didn’t hurt them. Then we had a warm spell where it got up in the 80s and we started having some ripening; I was cheering them on, hoping they’d just all suddenly turn red. Yes, I know that this was unrealistic, but that was my delusion. That bubble was burst this past weekend when we had two days of frost forecast. It was clear the season was at an end, with about 40-50 lbs of green tomatoes still sitting on the vines. If I left them, they’d just rot after they froze, so the only thing we could really do was pick them all immediately.
So out to the garden I went Saturday evening, with a couple of boxes and some scissors. It took me well over an hour but that was mostly because I was being squeamish about it. The harvesting I’d done so far involved gently removing whatever was ripe, with heartfelt thanks to the plant that produced it; and this on the other hand just felt like slaughter to me. The only thing that made it possible at all was knowing that if the frost wiped them out because I refused to cut them, then all the plants’ effort at growing those tomatoes would have been wasted. My hating to see anything wasted won over my reluctance to hurt the plants, but it was very traumatic and sad. I am steering clear of what is left of the garden until the vines are dead and brown before I clear it out.
I know this must sound very silly, but I even have trouble pruning plants, I just hate to destroy anything, and I feel like I am hurting them. But at least they didn’t go to waste. The bulk of the green tomatoes went to ‘good homes’ on Freecycle and the rest we’ll let ripen to use ourselves. I also brought in the last of the apples, the basil, and a few stray jalapenos, and yesterday was spent cooking a big veggie lasagna and some little apple-ginger-pecan pies in a made-from-scratch spelt biscuit crust. The latter were entirely Joy’s project, and they are yummy!
The original title of this post was going to be ‘I would never survive in the wild” but Joy suggested that my tomato meltdown just got me demoted from gardener to crafts instructor at Camp TEOTWAWKI, and I thought that was a lot funnier. TEOTWAWKI is an abbreviation for “The End Of The World As We Know It” in discussions of peak oil, climate change, economic disasters, etc; a few months back on Crunchy Chicken ‘s blog someone commented that they didn’t know what TEOTWAWKI meant, but it sounded like a camp on a lake… Crunchy Chicken even made a little sign for the camp in a following post. It DOES sound like a camp, and has just always stuck in our heads that way even since then. We were actually going to use it as a title for our ‘futurewatch’ link section except I didn’t feel like having to explain the reference. (which I’ve now ended up doing anyway, so maybe I should change the title?)
Tomato-carnage-stress aside, I will say that having a garden definitely has brought a closer awareness of the changing seasons, and made me think about a lot of things that had never occurred to me. For instance, now I understand all the weird recipes for green tomato jam and things like that — if our ancestors depended on a crop and it didn’t ripen in time, they found ways to use it anyway. It also made me aware of the drought (that has not ended) in a much more direct way. I have thought a lot about how hard it must be for those who depend on what they grow to survive, to lose a crop to a natural disaster, or to an early or late frost, or pests. Our society is so distanced from where our food comes from that most people don’t think about the cycle of seasons, or the weather, and how it affects our food supply. The knowledge we have lost, as a culture, in how to live off the land is alarming; and I am humbled by how much there is to learn, in order to just be able to successfully produce enough nutritious food to feed a family.
Anyway, I guess I need to toughen up a bit or give up the garden — though next year we’re going to pay a lot closer attention to the growing season of what we plant. Joy might rethink the whole ‘arts and crafts’ demotion, though, if she’d seen how many times I have nearly disfigured myself while doing pyrography and absently trying to scratch an itch with the hand holding the woodburner. 
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