Overwhelmed by abundance, those three words describe how I’m feeling this week. Don’t get me wrong abundance is a good thing and I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, I’m referring to the abundance of crops ready simultaneously this year.
The early heat wave in June seemed to catapult us straight into midsummer and everything is about three weeks early. So if you plan your holidays around your garden like I did this year, you might be feeling the crunch too.
There’s now an urgency to my garlic harvesting which is normally a relaxing way to recover from the annual family camping trip. I’ve just been informed that the freestone peaches are in full swing and won’t last till the end of August when I had planned on picking them up. This causes me concern as I usually spend the first week when the kids go back to school canning peaches and tomatoes/ Now I’m going to have to squeeze it into the next week or two. The plums and apples are in a race to begin falling from the trees and I’m trying my best to catch up in time.
It might sound a bit crazy to some people that these are the things that keep me up at night, but preserving the bounty that surrounds us is my labour of love. I look forward to these seasonal chores, they’ve become routine over the years. I guess I just hate to feel rushed through summer and the activities I usually savour…and that being said, I better get out to the garlic patch and “get ‘er done!” so I can move on to the peaches.
