My garden is changing the way I live and how I think of food

Now I know I’ve been flogging the subject of canning on my Facebook page for most of the last month, but I have to tell you it really changed the way I look not only at food, but also gardening.

The container garden on my deck did pretty well this summer, and I’m plotting my strategy for next year . . . going through the seed catalogs and online sites. We’ll limit the varieties next year and focus on the fresh veggies and then the veggies I’ll can.

That means cucumbers for bread and butter pickles, peppers for pepper relish and pepper jelly and tomatoes for fresh salads and then roasting and freezing. My applesauce came from the apples on the tree in my front yards. I finally lost the apple tree in back this summer after years of cracking trunks and branches. The last of the four major trunks gave up the ghost this summer in a storm. But it managed to survive a lot of cold winters.

So the deck garden is done, though I need to pull the remaining evidence of dead plants from many of the containers.

I’ve planted some garlic and will plant some onion sets this week. The garlic and onions went in a raised planting table and a bunch of soft-sided containers that I’ll tuck under the bench on the far end of the deck. Hopefully they’ll winter over and I’ll have onions and garlic by late July.

The process of growing a few vegetables that give me great salads and cooking ingredients has changed the way I look at food, and canning some things at the end of the season stretches that into the months when nothing’s growing out on that snow-covered deck. So when I open a jar of bread and butter pickles I made, or spread some pepper jelly over a block of cream cheese and serve it to visitors, there’s a sense of satisfaction that’s new to me.

Oh, I love cooking for people, so this is an extension of that, really. It’s taking a few little things and adding to that. Let’s not go crazy here . . . my little container garden isn’t grand or cutting edge or even very efficient. I’m working on some of those things.

But watching the bees and the hummingbirds zip from flower to flower, staying just a split second on a squash blossom before moving to the red salvia flowers planted in the container with bush beans and radishes, then darting to a few tomato blossoms before flying off is exciting to watch, and it’s exciting to think about next year and how to make it all better.

As the leaves fall and the weather starts to turn, I’ll glance out onto the deck, most of the containers and beds covered with tarps, and think about how I can set everything up next year to make sure I maximize the space, but also how I’ll make sure to have plenty flowers for the bees and hummingbirds, and plenty of veggies to enjoy through the season and then spend the late summer and early fall carefully filling those little jars with goodies that I’ll enjoy when the snow flies.