It Froze

It froze and I don't care. In fact, I am better off for it. I am quite tired of dealing with tomatoes. For reasons unknown this year's tomatoes of all shapes and colors, thanks to Treb, just kept pouring it on, pouring it on as if there were no garden tomorrow. We canned them, we dried them, we ate them, gave them to the chickens and even tossed a few questionable maggoty ones at the old grumbling lady as she hobbled past our place hell bent on using up our sidewalk. No, I didn't do that its just that when one has tomatoes of this profusion a person has to be imaginative, maybe desperate.

I don't want to be down in the mouth about them because last year the sauce ran out early on and getting our acidic acid allotment grew lean. Spring is the time of starvation here in Ireland, It is a time when we are down to blackened potatoes and a time when the bloody English are refusing to bring in wheat, even rotted wheat. The barks and brigantines are standing off the coast and the bastards are holding them at bay. If only we had harvested more tomatoes we would not have been in the shape we are in. But this year we are prepared. No amount of tactics of the Limeys will hold me down. I am tired of havin' me relatives heading of to the states for the good life. One sip of Bushmills and I am in the thick of a brogue.

Anyway, they are done and we should make it through with some forty pints of jalapeno laced sauce and solid bags of dried Death Apples. You heard it. They used to be called Death Apples because the Italians thought that being from the Nightshade family they were poison. If I am not mistaken they got them from us, we native Americans. For now the Death Apples are out of my life and I don't care. In truth, we are pleased by the abundance and this year. They were our featured harvest. But I am a free man now and no more the slave to the garden. Free at last.