for $2.75) based on the fruit’s unusual shape and color. From the catalogue description:
According to the Cucurbits of New York, this variety has been listed as a novelty for as long as American seed catalogs have been in print. Long banana-shaped melon tapered at both ends, 16-24” by 4” diameter. Smooth yellow skin, salmon-pink flesh. Good sweet spicy flavor.
In addition to the Banana Melons, I bought seeds for several kinds of tomatoes—Cream Sausage, Bloody Butcher, Hillbilly Potato Leaf, Cherokee Purple, Crnkovic Yugoslavian—plus Miniature Chocolate bell peppers, sunberries, Aunt Molly’s ground cherries, summer crookneck squash, A & C pickling cucumbers, Chioggia beets, Dragon carrots, Empress beans. I also bought a mixture of lettuces: Amish Deer Tongue, Australian Yellow-leaf, Bronze Arrowhead, Forellenschuss, Lolla Rossa, Pablo, Red Velvet, and Reine des Glaces. (I confess, I bought most of these seeds based more on their whimsical names than on their physical attributes.)
Even though the Home Depot tomatoes had been a bust, other vegetable plants (from seeds bought at the supermarket) were supplying us with a tidy harvest of cayenne peppers, figs, basil, squash, tomatoes, and watermelon. By midsummer, the average weekly haul was about ten or fifteen pounds of produce (not including oranges and grapefruits).
My garden produce looked so good that I often picked it and ate it without first going inside to wash it off. One afternoon I ate several figs, tomatoes, and basil leaves right off the plants, cleaning them by wiping them on my T-shirt.
That evening, as we were getting ready for bed, my stomach was feeling bloated and rumbly. I asked Carla how she felt, and she said she was fine. I figured my stomach discomfort was from eating three large bowls of the delicious homegrown-squash soup I’d made that afternoon. After falling into a light, restless sleep, I woke up at one-thirty in the morning with a sharp pain that started in the pit of my stomach and went all the way up to my esophagus. The pain rose and fell in waves, never going away completely, just cycling between “bad” and “excruciating.” I felt hot and nauseated, and my abdomen was swollen. I got up and started walking around the house to alleviate my suffering (moving around felt better than lying in bed). I stayed up most of the night.
At around 5 a.m. I crawled into bed, feeling more miserable than before. For the entire day, I lay motionless, not eating or drinking, getting out of bed only to throw up or deal with a bout of diarrhea. I’d been cocky about the recent E. coli and salmonella breakouts in commercially grown produce, boasting to everyone within earshot that homegrown produce wasn’t contaminated with pathogens. But my pesticide-free produce was undoubtedly crawling with microbes.
Fortunately it was just a twenty-four-hour bug, and by that evening the gastrointestinal distress had passed. But it had lasted long enough to teach me to always wash my produce before eating it.
When I related my experience to a coworker via e-mail, she told me about a friend, an industrial hygienist who diagnoses “sick buildings” for fungus infestation and has become something of a germophobe:
She was picking raspberries from my yard and dropped some on the ground—she took them home and washed them with a (very) mild bleach solution before she ate them. She poohpoohs (heh) a lot of mold concerns, but she says the ground is crawling with E. coli type stuff. From raccoon and possum and rodent poo. Ew.
That seemed like overkill to me. But I still carefully wash my homegrown produce (without bleach).
“WE HAVE GOPHER NEUROMANCERS”
My small garden was producing a fair amount of vegetables. By September I was the proud owner of a sizable plot of land formerly known as a lawn, and I was ready to take my gardening to the next level. First, though, I needed advice from someone who was already doing what I was thinking about doing, so I
According to the Cucurbits of New York, this variety has been listed as a novelty for as long as American seed catalogs have been in print. Long banana-shaped melon tapered at both ends, 16-24” by 4” diameter. Smooth yellow skin, salmon-pink flesh. Good sweet spicy flavor.
In addition to the Banana Melons, I bought seeds for several kinds of tomatoes—Cream Sausage, Bloody Butcher, Hillbilly Potato Leaf, Cherokee Purple, Crnkovic Yugoslavian—plus Miniature Chocolate bell peppers, sunberries, Aunt Molly’s ground cherries, summer crookneck squash, A & C pickling cucumbers, Chioggia beets, Dragon carrots, Empress beans. I also bought a mixture of lettuces: Amish Deer Tongue, Australian Yellow-leaf, Bronze Arrowhead, Forellenschuss, Lolla Rossa, Pablo, Red Velvet, and Reine des Glaces. (I confess, I bought most of these seeds based more on their whimsical names than on their physical attributes.)
Even though the Home Depot tomatoes had been a bust, other vegetable plants (from seeds bought at the supermarket) were supplying us with a tidy harvest of cayenne peppers, figs, basil, squash, tomatoes, and watermelon. By midsummer, the average weekly haul was about ten or fifteen pounds of produce (not including oranges and grapefruits).
My garden produce looked so good that I often picked it and ate it without first going inside to wash it off. One afternoon I ate several figs, tomatoes, and basil leaves right off the plants, cleaning them by wiping them on my T-shirt.
That evening, as we were getting ready for bed, my stomach was feeling bloated and rumbly. I asked Carla how she felt, and she said she was fine. I figured my stomach discomfort was from eating three large bowls of the delicious homegrown-squash soup I’d made that afternoon. After falling into a light, restless sleep, I woke up at one-thirty in the morning with a sharp pain that started in the pit of my stomach and went all the way up to my esophagus. The pain rose and fell in waves, never going away completely, just cycling between “bad” and “excruciating.” I felt hot and nauseated, and my abdomen was swollen. I got up and started walking around the house to alleviate my suffering (moving around felt better than lying in bed). I stayed up most of the night.
At around 5 a.m. I crawled into bed, feeling more miserable than before. For the entire day, I lay motionless, not eating or drinking, getting out of bed only to throw up or deal with a bout of diarrhea. I’d been cocky about the recent E. coli and salmonella breakouts in commercially grown produce, boasting to everyone within earshot that homegrown produce wasn’t contaminated with pathogens. But my pesticide-free produce was undoubtedly crawling with microbes.
Fortunately it was just a twenty-four-hour bug, and by that evening the gastrointestinal distress had passed. But it had lasted long enough to teach me to always wash my produce before eating it.
When I related my experience to a coworker via e-mail, she told me about a friend, an industrial hygienist who diagnoses “sick buildings” for fungus infestation and has become something of a germophobe:
She was picking raspberries from my yard and dropped some on the ground—she took them home and washed them with a (very) mild bleach solution before she ate them. She poohpoohs (heh) a lot of mold concerns, but she says the ground is crawling with E. coli type stuff. From raccoon and possum and rodent poo. Ew.
That seemed like overkill to me. But I still carefully wash my homegrown produce (without bleach).
“WE HAVE GOPHER NEUROMANCERS”
My small garden was producing a fair amount of vegetables. By September I was the proud owner of a sizable plot of land formerly known as a lawn, and I was ready to take my gardening to the next level. First, though, I needed advice from someone who was already doing what I was thinking about doing, so I
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