Liz's Garden September 14 2014

“I eat local because I can” was printed boldly on the front of a tee shirt surrounding a clutch of Mason jars; that just about sums up my summer. When my husband and I purchased an old farm house and some acreage, I reverted back to the habits of my childhood. The first harbingers of spring are not robins (they are here all winter anyway), but the arrival of the seed catalogues. It all looks so alluring; I just want to grow one of everything.  But time, the most patient of teachers, has gradually led us to plant a reasonable amount of things that allows us to supple the table and the tables of our friends and permit me to stock our cellar with homemade pickles of many varieties and sauerkraut. 

Perhaps our must interesting crop is an heirloom pepper. The grandparents of a friend emigrated from Hungary in 1912. With them they brought the seeds for a variety of pepper particular to Hungarian cuisine.  The family has grown these peppers every year since that time and we have developed a repertoire of recipes for them.

I sometimes think I was born in the wrong century, somehow sewing, growing vegetables and canning does not sound like a modern, theoretically liberated woman. I have decided a pox on liberation, at my age I can do what I want. By Elizabeth Edwards