By David Heiller

Sue greeted us with a box of tomatoes on Saturday night.

She had come to call a dance, and she figured someone might need a few tomatoes. She had more than she could use.

A few people took some over the course of the evening, but most of them are sitting on our kitchen counter right now, along with the cucumbers and zucchini that I took to work last week.

We have more cukes and zukes than we can use, so I passed a few of them off to my co-workers.

Then Robin at work asked if anyone could use some squash. She planted quite a few, and although they arenít quite ripe, she can already see a surplus, and is planning for their distribution. She has more than she can use.

She was following the footsteps of Jill, who had given me a feed bag full of sweet corn a week earlier. She couldnít use it all.

All of this made me realize that we have another season in Minnesota going on right now, the More Than We Can Use season. It falls between real summer and fall, when the gardens are peaking and we donít know what to do with stuff.

It can be defined partly by the weather, and it is fine weather indeed. The air is cooler, clearer. You cuddle up with your sweetheart at night, and you grab a sweatshirt when you get up in the morning.

Those brutal days of July are gone. We might get a few more scorchers, but you can smell autumn just ahead. And those brutal days of July are the reason for the richness of the garden. Thatís when the roots went deep and the fruit set. You could almost hear the corn grow then, and that Joe Burg alfalfa looked good enough to eat.

I had to grease my pumpkins, they were growing so fast back then. They moved across the garden like an angry squid. You had to dance a jig to get out of the way. Without a little lubrication, they would like to have burned the hillside from the sparks and friction.

In other words, need any pumpkins?

Some of the produce will go to waste, and itís good to learn to accept that. Sue gave me permission to throw her tomatoes in the compost pile if I couldnít use them, and some of the older ones are going to get pitched, because I have my own set of tomatoes to process and give away.

Donít feel guilty. We all have a lot of the ìwaste not, want notî philosophy, and we donít like throwing stuff away.

But those big cucumbers that even Jill Hahn wouldnít eat, what are you going to do with them? And that zucchini the size of a white oak log at Staggemeyer Stave, not even a kind hearted soul like Doris Mitchell would take it in.

Every day something from the garden makes it to the dinner table, and that feels very good. We eat what we can and what we canít we can. We fill the fridge with bread-and-butter pickles, freeze the Myhre corn, bake zucchini bread, pickle the beets, and pawn off the rest.

Itís a good time of year, this bountiful season. We donít often have More Than We Can Use.

Letís enjoy it while we can.

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