Vegetables on Vacation

My vegetable garden may be growing on me, but it’s still not family. That’s another way of saying that when my clan—nine strong—takes a two-week beach vacation to Rhode Island, the starter garden will be stuck at home.


I don’t mind if my plants sulk, but I suppose I’d rather they not die. (I feel the same way about a number of people.) More than that, I don’t want to allow two bumper weeks of summer vegetables to rot on the vine. What, I wondered, would become of my nutritious lettuce while I was gorging myself, Ocean State-style, on fried clams, Portuguese sweet bread, and the curious coffee syrup called “Autocrat”?

According to Mary Hockenberry Meyer, a professor and extension horticulturist with the University of Minnesota, the lettuce would bolt in the August heat. I had momentary pictures of a little green Lassie crossing the country to find me, but Dr. Meyer soon explained what the word “bolt” actually means.

“Instead of producing all these leaves down at the base,” she said, “a big stalk is going to develop, and at the top will be the flowers and seeds. You have small leaves and they’re often bitter. Bolting pretty much ends your lettuce harvest.”

The healthy lettuce heads that had already developed could wait out the swelter, she said, but the leaves might become strong and bitter. “Some people might like that,” Dr. Meyer said.
Prospects were better for my root crops, she said: the beets, carrots, and turnips. These vegetables had a bureaucrat’s talent for waiting, and the carrots and turnips wouldn’t strictly need to be picked until the ground started to harden. Contrary to rumor, even in Minnesota, that date does not arrive in mid-August.

Between the bolting lettuce and those patient turnips, there were a number of vegetables whose behavior would be harder to predict. “Heat plays a big factor in ripening tomatoes,” Dr. Meyer said. Cherry and pear tomatoes would likely split, then drop off the vine and rot. Such behavior struck me as a little operatic, but that’s a tomato for you. The Roma cultivar, Dr. Meyer suggested, with its “thick cell wall on the outside” and its lower water content, could linger a little longer without spoiling.

My pickling cucumbers would also ripen fast, going from preemies to post-terms in a fortnight. But where the brooding, cracked tomato would spill its guts out on the earth, the neglected cucumber would just gain a little weight around the middle. “They tend to become fatter and have more seeds on the inside,” Dr. Meyer said. Even if they were to become “a little larger than you may like,” she added, “they’re still edible.”

Similarly, the broccoli wouldn’t grow any more appetizing for languishing in the yard. In no time, Dr. Meyer said, “those little tiny florets that we like to eat will turn into yellow flowers.” The heads would stretch out and elongate, too, which conjured up some very disturbing images from the gross-out cinema of David Cronenberg.

Yet it would probably be rash to change my vacation plans. It occurred to me while I surveyed the garden that my broccoli plants are about ten inches high. They show no signs of producing florets or yellow flowers. Before I start worrying about the hypothetical problems in my hypothetical garden, I’d be better off pulling a weed, here and now.

So was Dr. Meyer saying that I could abandon my starter garden for two weeks and expect to come back to a flourishing garden fit for a seed catalog photo shoot? No, she was not. “To be two weeks without water at a critical time for vegetable development is a big concern,” she said. “If you’re going to be away I’d ask a neighbor to water.”

And how might I entice my neighbors to squander an hour or two dragging a hose around my yard, while I waltz through the glamorous mansions of Newport’s rich and dead?
Dr. Meyer, it turns out, had an answer. “Pay them with the vegetables,” she said.