FAIR TIME
Believe it or not, there are people who don't own a computer, who don't own a cell phone, and who, when asked about tweeting, will assume you are talking about the finches at their backyard bird feeder. Where I live, about 50 miles west and north of Washington, DC, you can run into them just about anywhere, but especially at the County Fair, which is being held this week.
Fair time is still big time where I live. The fair celebrates a period in our nation's history when people still knew how to make things, mostly because they had to. The clothes they wore, the food they ate, the table they ate at, all those things were hand-made, often in the home. Entering your own homemade pie or cake or preserves or knitted sweater is a way of honoring that tradition that is as American as well, apple pie.
Speaking of home-grown work, I just finished making spaghetti sauce in which almost every ingredient came out of my garden. I got a real sense of how much work it is to make your own food.
Forget the time it took to grow the stuff, which given that this was my first year doing a square foot garden was, to put it charitably, a learning experience. I spent three hours boiling and peeling and smushing 5 pounds of fresh tomatoes and chopping basil, oregano, peppers and carrots. Compare this to my usual method: heating up a jar or two of the very excellent Newman's Own Socakrooni sauce, slopping in a little red wine and calling it a life.
Oh well, given what it cost me to create the garden and buy vegetable plants and seeds, I figure in another year or two or three I will break even. In the meantime, I will savor every bite of Everyman's Own Fair Time Sauce.
September 20, 2009
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Tags:
County Fair
Gardening
