Vegetable harvest

It's tough writing about gardening but someone has to do it. Just yesterday I pulled up to the curb in front of my house with a trunk full of vegetables. So many vegetables the front wheels of the car were just skimming the ground.

It all started when Mena called to say the tomatoes were ready for picking. Mena is Jack Vecia's wife. You remember Jack from last year. He has the fruit and vegetable garden in Burlington that begins with apples and ends with zucchini and has everything in between.

I've known him for years, ever since he showed viewers of my show Gardener's Journal on HGTV, how to over winter fig trees by burying them.

When Jack and Mena call to come and get food from their garden, you don't say no. And you better have plans to use it all because squandering anything that comes out of their organic garden is a crime against nature.

Jack had a dozen or so three litre and six litre baskets waiting for me when I arrived. "Bring those back Kathy, I need them," he said as we dashed off to the beans.

"I grow these this way for Mena, they're easy to pick," he said as we started to harvest what I guessed were a European variety pole bean. They were meticulously tied up on supports, tall as me, and right at shoulder level for picking. There was a skinny type and a fatter type, much longer than the squat green beans we often see in supermarkets. I snacked on them raw (a great source of fiber and vitamins A and C) as Jack told me he planted the beans in secession about a month apart so he has a long harvest.

Then we moved on to the tomatoes, roma, beefsteak and cherry, growing in perfectly straight rows. In five minutes we had enough to feed a soccer team. "We'll pick some green ones Kathy," Mena said, "so you don't have to use them right away." But we couldn't touch friend Tony's tomatoes. They were growing in pots, right close to the house. Basking in the reflected heat of the brick, they ripen earlier than Jack's other tomatoes.

We passed rows of broccoli and cauliflower, cool season crops. "Later, I'll tie the leaves of the cauliflower up to keep the head white," Jack says. "I'll be picking them right through December.

In the next row we crouched to pick hot, red, cayenne peppers. Long and thin, they looked like the fingernails on Nosferatu. "I put just a pinch, not too much in my tomato sauce," instructs Mena.

"Mena, where's my knife," asked Jack as we blasted down the eggplant row. He cut five beautiful eggplants for me, round ones the colour of Royal purple.

We whizzed past the apples. A disappointment this year for the Vecias. They are dropping off without ripening, maybe because of the harsh winter and wet spring. "Kathy, don't let anybody tell you you can grow apples without spraying, it's the one thing you have to spray." Indeed, a farmer in Hamilton once told me if you want to grow broke, grow apples.

Into my baskets go black figs and green figs, and beautiful pears the colour of mahogany.

Underneath the pear trees I notice a ring of lush arugula. "I'don't waste any space," says Jack as we begin to pinch the leaves off this most wonderful of salad greens. The leaves are tender and perfect. How does he do it I wonder, I've tried to grow arugula and the leaves end up with pockmarks and blisters. "It's the soil Kathy, " he tells me, "I freshen it each year with lime." I notice too the arugula is growing in dappled sun, in weed free beds, that's important too since it doesn't compete well for water.

Finished picking we relax with coffee and Mena's cookies with fig filling. I then am instructed to go straight home, the car is too hot especially for the arugula.

I do that and immediately start cooking. The roma tomatoes are sliced, sprinkled with balsamic, salt and pepper and put in a 200F oven to slowly roast. I'll freeze most of them when they are finished. On a depressing winter day, take a few out, warm them up and have them on a toasted bagel with goat cheese and arugula. It's heaven.

I will make arugula pesto for freezing as well, just arugula, olive oil, and salt and pepper, put through the food processor.

The eggplants are destined for the barbecue. Slice them in half, make fine cuts in a criss cross pattern, sprinkle with salt and then let them drain a while before putting on a light coating of olive oil. On the barbecue the flesh turns golden brown, and the criss crossing makes them look like a handsome artichoke. They're finished when they are soft. I caught my husband testing for doneness with a drywall saw. Not recommended but it worked.

The day ended perfectly, food for the freezer and a five star dinner of salmon barbecued on a cedar plank, arugula salad with cherry tomatoes, eggplant, beans and Pinot Grigio. We ate outside; the snowy tree crickets sounded like sleigh bells and the weather was cool.

Thanks Jack and Mena.