Hope springs eternal. My fall vegetable garden has renewed my self-confidence as a gardener. The baby kale, carrots and lettuce are coming along nicely. I picked a wonderful assortment of greens for a delicious salad over the weekend.

My smugness will be my undoing. For several weeks now, I’ve been bragging about my field peas. Originally I purchased a 50 pound bag which I kept in the freezer. I planted it into flats in my greenhouse in order to have young shoots and tendrils to enhance winter salads. Now I’ve been planting it as a cover crop in my vegetable garden following mid-summer harvests of onions and garlic.

What I don’t know is a lot! For example, I grow beautiful tomatoes, but at the point of ripeness something inevitably happens. Some four-legged or two-winged creature comes along for one bite. Then he naturally doesn’t finish the job but moves on to the next one.

Because I work outside all week, there’s nothing like a rainy Sunday to put things in order for me. I’m sorry for you folks who count on sunny weekends. I like to wash and prepare produce for the week. This past weekend, I made some refrigerator pickles, cooked and sliced beets to add to salads and peeled and chopped garlic. If the food is at the ready my evenings are much smoother. I’ve often joked that I spend all day making tomato sauce from scratch but send out for pizza in sheer exhaustion.

I spent Saturday in the garden with Violet and her friend Cesca Robinson. It doesn’t get any better than watching little girls wandering around the garden. They picked and prepared a salad. On a bed of large-leafed basil they arranged sun gold tomatoes. They put a tiny slice in each tomato and inserted some pea shoots, which only emerged a week ago. They garnished with double click white cosmos and sprigs of thyme. Don’t worry, they did not eat the cosmos. They ate several green peppers each.

How many ways can a person prepare and enjoy summer squash and zucchini? I don’t know the answer but am seriously working on it. Last night I sautéed some squash and onions and served it over red quinoa with Bragg’s liquid amines. I felt as if I’d been transported back to the sixties. There were years of brown rice and vegetables. Sometime in the eighties I stopped eating rice so much. Because of gardening and growing my own food, rice no longer appealed to me.