September 19, 2012

Rangpur Limes, Sweet Potatoes, and More

On Saturday morning I couldn’t wait to get up and get out in the yard. We’d been on vacation, so everything had gone to pot. There was so much to do, it was hard to know where to begin. Rob and I spent the whole day weeding, mowing, and edging. Oh, it was fun—pulling up camphor seedlings and singing dumb songs to myself. I saw a turtle and lots of nice toads. We have so many toads this year; I believe they were all born in our pond.

On Sunday morning we harvested our sweet potatoes, a very disappointing endeavor. A lot of our sweet potatoes rotted, or they had big bites taken out of them. Rob was being so funny and dramatic. He kept up a running commentary as we dug: “Oh, look, here’s a nice one! Oh, no. Never mind. It’s rotten. Totally rotten. . . . And this one would have been nice if some subterranean creature hadn’t eaten about half of it. Oh, I’m so disappointed. Oh, I’m going to cry. I thought we’d surely have 50 pounds of sweet potatoes, but we might not even have enough for tonight’s small supper. . . .” He went on and on.

But then he had an idea. “I know!” he said. “We can harvest some of our wonderful Rangpur limes to make ourselves feel better!” He was only partially kidding. The main reason he wanted to pick the limes was that the tree was so loaded he was worried branches might break. But his spirits really did rise as we picked. He was singing the praises of the Rangpur, talking nonstop: “Just look at this glorious bounty! Just look at this beauty! How many limes do you think we have here? I can’t even begin to count. And the tree is so young! It’s only three years old. Imagine when it’s 10 or 20. Imagine! We’ll be forcing limes on everyone. We’ll be begging strangers to take them!”

I love it when Rob is really enthusiastic about things, so I really enjoyed the lime picking. We ended up picking 22 pounds of limes, just a small, small fraction of the total on the tree. Then that night we stayed up late squeezing them all and getting the juice ready to freeze. Our freezer is now full of Rangpur lime juice. It’s the most beautiful color—chartreuse.

Our Rangpur lime harvest

We spent Sunday afternoon putting our fall vegetable garden in. We ripped out all the tired old summer crops and weeded and added wheelbarrow loads of compost. Then we planted a bunch of starters: Bubbles Brussels sprouts, Top Bunch collards, Ruby Perfection red cabbage, Bonnie Best green cabbage, and Packman broccoli. I should have taken pictures of our new garden, but all I’ve got are these random flower shots: