Yesterday was a garden day.

The forecast called for frost and I didn't feel like covering crops. The past few days I've been digging up potatoes, freezing grape tomatoes, and making at least one meal a day that features tomatoes. The garden has been a wonderful boon this year, but it was time to put it to rest.

First on the agenda: picking ripe tomatoes. This is kind of tough since the recent rains have caused tomatoes to over-inflate and split at the seams. Mainly the cherry tomatoes, which have been more like golf ball tomatoes this year. If I had a set of clubs I'd be tempted to golf up a basket of the particularly oozing ones. The Romas have been great and I harvested three gallons of ripe ones. A dozen were diced and thrown into the big batch of homemade chili, the rest will be dealt with in the coming days.

Next came the basil. Last Spring I bought fresh cooking basil at the supermarket for tomato and mozzarella appetizers. It was this new "ultra-fresh" marketing technique where the roots are still on the plants. Hmm, I thought, why don't I just plant these after plucking off some leaves? Well, they didn't appreciate the jump from plastic-bag-under-supermarket-fluorescents to being in real dirt and real sun on a windowsill. Only a few survived and another later died from the shock of being transplanted into the garden. The other two limped wiltingly along for a few weeks before finding some hidden reserve to carry on with life.

Now we have two basil bushes almost three foot tall and a couple of feet around. The stems coming out of the ground are tough and thick, like the bark of a tree, which I sawed on ineffectually with a kitchen knife before finally snapping off barehand.

Harvest the good leaves, wash, and shake dry, all the while filling the house with the unmistakable odor of basil. I'd bought extra garlic, parmesan, and nuts (pine and walnut) just for the occasion: Pesto makin', of course. According to a friend you can make and freeze pesto. We bought a vacuum sealer this year and I've been vacuum sealing and freezing darn near everything. For the tomato sauces (and the pesto) I put them in a shallow, square pan or dish and freeze, then pry out, plop into a bag and vacuum seal. If nothing else it gives the freezer an orderly, just-add-water, space food look.

With four blocks of pesto in the freezer I decided to try an experiment and put the remaining leaves in a vacuum bag and freeze them. Funny looking, especially sitting next to the vacuum bagged grape tomatoes. I'll have to post pictures at some point. BTW, if you are looking for a good use for pesto be sure to try etherf@rm's Pesto Crusted Salmon. I didn't use the breadcrumbs but it was still very tasty.

Meanwhile the chili was simmering along nicely. My base recipe for chili usually goes something like:

sauté diced onion in oil
add diced garlic (4-6 cloves) towards end
throw in chunks of meat and brown
bunch of beans (whatever is around, we're beanidextrous)
tomatoes, many
hot peppers - usually three of varying intensity
other veggies: celery, red/green pepper, squash, rutabaga, whatever you're trying to get rid of that won't be too obnoxious
spices: loads-o-black pepper, salt, sage, turmeric, cayenne pepper, and cumin (we have a mason jar labeled "too much cumin" [Faith humor] which is the bulk cumin I use when less culinary finesse is acceptable)
smoked cheese rind: Garfield's smoked cheese (Meriden, NH) has a nice, thick smoky rind that when diced finely and added to chili or potato soup adds just the right ambiance.

Well, now I'm drooling again. Unfortunately we didn't have any Garfield's, but the chili turned out just fine and was welcome on a cold fall night.

Back at the garden I was looking for anything else worth salvaging and ran across The Illustrated Cuke you see in the picture below. I'm not sure if we should eat it or sell it on on Ebay. Next to the cukes were the mutant cabbages. I think Faith picked the first heads earlier this year but that can't begin to explain the strangeness in the cabbage patch. Where once there was one cabbage, now four or six smaller heads are growing. Some form of vegetable Hydra monster. No matter how monstrous they look the bugs found them irresistible and turned them into a multi-headed and multi-dimensioned collections of wormhole art. They sure didn't look edible. Just in case I peeled off some layers to see if beauty lay any deeper. It did, albeit six or eight layers deep. Out of a dozen distorted heads I saved four, softball size cabbages.

Which really got me wondering about cabbage. I understand plants trying to survive and reproduce, but what's with the layered leaves thing? It's like nature's own Guinness book of records contest: how many leaves can you wrap together in a ball and how tight can you wrap them? Same goes for lettuce, it makes no sense.

And that wraps it up for the garden afternoon and evening. The frost came but seems to have spared most of the tomatoes. Even so, I'll try to spare you from any more tomato stories. At least this year.

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