by Tom Motley
It takes a lot of time and patience to find certain garden items. It’s actually the case that some garden things literally hide from you. But, with attentive searching, even the most elusive, most recalcitrant items will finally be discovered. The feeling experienced upon finding them is often like discovering King Solomon’s mines.
For example, strawberries quietly position themselves beneath bold, fat, round leaves. Like precious rubies, they must be mined from their hidden crevices. If you maintain a constant bird’s-eye view angle whenever reconnoitering the strawberry patch, you’ll never find the little red treasures. Nor do the birds, for the same reason, by the way.
The joy of lifting serrated, scratchy, itchy, lemon cucumber leaves to discover dozens of hidden bright yellow globes is well worth any temporary allergic reaction to your arms. Spreading over the garden floor or staying close to the lattice base (lemon cucumbers like to climb, too) this fruit uses the irritating leaves as cover, from birds and the sun.
The luscious, lemon-sized beauties even have a slight citrus flavor on the back of the tongue. This is our favorite cucumber. Sliced for salads, the golden round coins add rich flavor and rich conversation to any dinner party. Guests are delighted. Wife Becca makes both her famous Greek tzatziki and Spanish gazpacho with lemon cucumbers. The flavor of each dish is distinctly enhanced, using lemon cukes.
Speaking of gazpacho, this is a bumper-crop year in North Texas for heirloom tomatoes. You know this, if you’ve been attending local farmers’ markets in the area. It’s one of those rare years when every critical element necessary fell together at the right time: heat, sun, rain, and (relatively) cool nights. We’ve enjoyed delicious Black Prince, Tumblers, Celebrity, Nyagous, and Early Girl varieties all summer from our McKinney gardens. Everybody has tomatoes in North Texas this year.
Ask your favorite restaurant about the source of the tomatoes they’re currently serving you. If those tomatoes are from, say, Guatemala, or China or California, just ask “Why aren’t they from Collin County or Hunt County or Grand Prairie, Mesquite, Duncanville, Arlington, Balch Springs, Oak Cliff, Red Oak, Waxahachie, or from any of the numerous Farmers’ Markets around DFW?” You should be eating local tomatoes this year that experienced a very short ride from the garden to your table.
Tomatoes are pretty cagey about hiding as well, incidentally. How many times have you missed a perfect tomato that stayed low to the ground, toward the center of the trunk, under massive leaf-cover, only to discover its over-ripe form too late, mutilated by an industrious Cardinal or grass-hopper? To reap a good day’s harvest of ripe tomatoes demands that you see the plants from all angles. We check ours morning and evening, because the raking light shifts, revealing red globes at one time of the day you didn’t see at another. Oh, and take off your sunglasses while hunting for tomatoes.
Masking and camouflaging themselves in myriad ways, in order to avoid predators, many of our favorite garden items can be hard to find. The plant hopes we will leave at least some of the product alone long enough so that it can grow to full flower, fruit, and fall back to earth as seed.
To make your hunt for hidden treasure in the garden less injurious, I recommend you wear a long-sleeve shirt. My wife’s skin is allergic to okra leaves and stems, for example. Okra is a tall, hardy, heat-tolerant, drought-tolerant, big, scratchy-leafed plant that came to American soil from Africa, as did cotton. (The two plants are relatives). Finding all the young okra before it gets too long and too tough is a chore, best not undertaken in a tank-top. As for myself, my skin is not bothered much by okra, but cucumber and zucchini vines are my epidermal nemesis. I might venture into an okra jungle short-sleeved, if necessary, but never do I harvest cukes or zukes without a long-sleeved shirt.
Happy hunting.