Saturday, September 26, 2009

An Overdose of Okra

We hadn’t been to the garden in over a week. With Richard being puny from the flu, my travels, and the rain, we’d let the garden go native. I suspected that there was a great deal of okra crying out to be picked, but I was intimidated by the scope of the project. The problem is that I feel guilty if I let any of Richard’s and Mamie’s hard gardening work go to waste. I had a good excuse for not visiting the garden as long as the rain continued. And I was busy writing my blog and lining up donations for our niece's flooded family.

It hadn’t rained in two days, so it’s a good thing Richard woke up in a “harvesting mood”. He headed over to Mamie’s where he found at least a bushel of mutant okra so big it tipped the plants over. We could have used them for billy clubs, but they’re not so good for food. Upon his return home,he heaped high the kitchen counters with fuzzy green giants for me to sort.

While I was cutting the tenderest pods, Jack called. He reminded me that his okra also hadn’t been harvested in over a week. I already had a couple of bushels of the slimy little seedpods. Where was I going to put more? Oy vey! Such an overdose of okra! I wonder if the Israelites had this problem with manna. Did they fill every goat skin bag they had with milk and honey, and then feel guilty because there was no way to use all of God’s gifts at once? There are now two large roasters of okra in the oven, and plenty of pods in the compost heap.I saved the babies for pickling.

That bodacious bounty taken care of, Richard decided to pick up the black walnuts littering our lawn. I’ve been told that the only way to crack them is to place them on a concrete driveway and run them over with your car. We don’t have any concrete, so Richard tried cracking the shells with a hammer. He allowed that the bodily injury this method could cause far outweighed the value of the nutmeats. Now he’s waiting for the walnuts to dry, so he can try other methods of black walnut extraction. I guess we know why the hand-picked pieces of black walnut at Designs by Baerreis are so pricey.

We’re having a lot of company in October. I know I’ll be serving oodles of okra, gobs of green beans and mounds of Maque Chou. And since Jack and I are renting a space to sign and sell his book at the Coker Creek Ruritan’s Autumn Gold festival, I might just decide to sell jars of jelly and other goodies from our garden.

I’m off to Atlanta again to deliver to our flooded family the harvest of household items from our kind Coker Creek friends. I wonder if they’d like some smothered okra…