Most of these vegetables are being canned or frozen. And that’s where Meredith enters the picture. I do the growing and picking, and Meredith is in charge of the produce preservation department. And she has been busy. To date, she has prepared and canned over 78 pounds of pickle cucumbers (36 quarts and 20 pints canned) and 88 pounds of tomatoes (26 quarts of pasta sauce), not to mention over four quarts of pickled peppers and five pints of candied Jalapeno peppers. She has also frozen 19 pounds of beans. And there is more to come. As I write she has 15 pounds of tomatoes ready to be made in sauce.
I didn’t realize how time consuming it is to can or freeze large quantities of vegetables. Take the pasta sauce. The tomatoes have to be washed, put in hot water, allowed to cool, have the skins removed, mashed into a paste, put through a sieve to remove the seeds, boiled down to the right consistency with added diced peppers and onions, garlic and oregano and poured into canning jars. After the lids are placed on them the jars have to be boiled for the right amount of time to be preserved.
That’s a lot of work, and I’m starting to feel guilty about all the hours that Meredith is spending in the kitchen doing all that canning and freezing. I hate feeling guilty. Fortunately I have the same ability as most married men to come up with ways to justify the division of labor within the household.
Most men probably do not believe these excuses are sufficient to convince their wives that the division of labor is fair and equitable. That would be tantamount to selling refrigerators to Eskimos. We realize that most experienced wives have long since learned that men are shiftless no-accounts when it comes to household tasks. I believe that men invent these rationalizations in order to avoid having guilty feelings that might otherwise ruin important activities like fishing, laying on the couch watching football, golf and puttering around the workshop making useless things.
There are several tried and true excuses that men rely on to justify not helping out with household chores like canning and freezing. One of them is that “(insert wife’s name) really hates having me under her feet when she’s doing (insert household chore).” I know it’s weak.
Another way men avoid feelings of guilt is by being ignorant or inept. In some cases this is not an invented excuse. I am genuinely ignorant or inept when it comes to so many household tasks. Washing machines and dryers baffle me. I’ll be damned if I can figure out how to set the timer on the coffee maker. In my hands a vacuum cleaner with its cords and hoses is an invitation to disaster or serious injury. I do not know how to can, blanch beans properly or prepare tomato sauce for canning. You might argue that I could learn to do these things. Yeah, well, I’ve been trying to learn how to use the DVR remote control for two years, and how’s that going?
For me, one of the best of the tried and true ways to rationalize why I’m not helping out with the canning and freezing that I cannot do anything in the kitchen without making a mess. Like most men, I unable do something as simple as making a sandwich without leaving a trail of evidence on the countertop in the form of crumbs, spots of mayo, pickle juice, and whatever else has gone into the sandwich of the day—and that’s when I’m are trying to be neat and tidy. If I tried to make tomato sauce from scratch the kitchen would look like the aftermath of an explosion at the Chef Boyardee factory by the time I finished.
I’ve come up a new reason to justify doing the picking and leaving the canning and freezing to Meredith. It protects Meredith from being exposed to the perils of the garden. Laugh if you will, but harvesting vegetables from the garden is not an easy task.
Take pickle picking. It’s a chore to hunt for small cucumbers. They hide under the leaves. You have to get on your hands and knees to find them which means that you’re probably going to put your hand on a slimy slug at some point in the process. The plants are trained to crawl up tent-like frames to keep the fruit off the ground, and you have to crawl under the frames to get at any cucks that have grown there. The sweat is running into your eyes, and then Mr. Horsefly decides to land on your neck. The resulting frenzy of panicked action is not pretty or pleasant. Imagine a man having a grand mal seizure in the middle of a flower bed, and you’ll get the picture.
Picking tomatoes is not a lot of fun either. I’m growing 36 Roma tomato plants. They each produce a lot of tomatoes, and they do so continuously throughout the season. You have to pick the ripe ones and leave the others on the plant to get ripe. The plants are big and bushy which means that you have to bend over or squat to find the ripe tomatoes. When I’m through picking tomatoes for the day I feel like I need physical therapy. But that’s not the worst. The worst is when you encounter a tomato hornworm caterpillar. I’m not exaggerating. These things are as long and as thick as a large man’s middle finger. The first time I reached into a tomato plant and one fell on my arm I about soiled my pants.
Even picking green beans is not without its perils. I grew pole beans on seven-foot tall frames this year. I don’t have to bend over to pick the beans like I did with the bush beans last year. It’s easy on my back. What could be more pleasant? But green beans produce blossoms, and blossoms attract bees—big bees and little bees, but particularly bumblebees.
Bumblebees are huge. Science suggests they should not be able to fly given the size of their wings. But they do fly, and they sound like an A-10 Warthog on a strafing run. Apparently human ears resemble large bean blossoms because bumblebees seem to spend a lot time investigating ear holes from close range. When you’re standing between two seven-foot walls of green beans with a basket in one hand and picked beans in the other and a large, fuzzy, buzzing bumblebee threatens to get intimate with your ear it takes a lot of willpower and dedication to the task not to cut and run.
The way I figure it, facing the perils of picking is a fair trade for the work of canning and freezing, and that assuages any feeling of guilt I might have about not helping out when I see Meredith slaving away in the kitchen. And if that excuse starts to wear thin after a while, give me time—I’m pretty sure I can come up with another.
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