By Sallie Satterthwaite
Special to The Citizen

For everything there is a season, says the Old Testament preacher, a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted.

Consider with me the seasons of vegetables, now approaching "plucking up" time. Swiss chard is my inspiration du jour.

I usually plant a row or two of that crisp delicacy, and this year, inspired by the splendor in Kroger's produce section, I planted red chard — rhubarb chard, the Burpee's seed folks call it.

It fairly leaped from the ground, and by late May, I had a spectacular stand of green leaves veined in crimson, with a few aberrant plain ones for contrast. I cut it to encourage continued production, and carried a heaping colander for Dave to admire, lamenting what steaming would do to it.

"You'd better never raise chickens if you can't stand to cook vegetables," he commented drily, turning back to the defective spa heater on his workbench.

He's right, of course. I no longer even buy chicken unless he insists.

The great joy of a vegetable garden, my fellow dirt-daubers will agree, is watching it progress from crumbly dirt to rows of brave two-leaved seedlings to young plants crowding each other until flowers appear, then the first swelling of the fruit, and at last, harvest time — which in our climate can be year-round.

This year spring made good her promises in my tiny fenced patch, with enough spinach and lettuce for early salads, and now the chard, and a few little tomatoes and bell peppers already set on the stem. In one corner, potato foliage thrives and in the herb bed, parsley has never been so lush.

A row of carrots wintered over near the fence. I left them there when I discovered a black swallow-tailed butterfly laying eggs on them in March. Fascinated, we watched her larval offspring munch the ferny leaves, growing fatter and prettier from one day to the next — all yellow and black and green — until suddenly the carrot stems were bare shafts. I threw netting over the row to protect the caterpillars from hungry birds, but one day every one was gone, transformed, we hope, into hidden chrysalises.

My absolutely favorite flower — that of the crooked neck squash — greets me in golden exuberance each morning, usually host to a drowsy bumblebee or two. Yesterday the first squash demanded to be picked.

The only disappointments: for the third year, the snowpeas are apathetic, barely off the ground. And something has been digging up my beans. Only a half-dozen pole beans have begun to climb the tomato cages I put up for support, but the rest, plus all the bush beans I've sowed, vanished as quickly as I planted (and replanted) them. An empty hole, an inch deep, marked the spot where each had been. I suspect chipmunks. Brown thrashers, maybe.

I've thwarted the varmints this time, whoever they are. After soaking the seeds overnight as usual, I planted them deep and pressed an inverted glass or jelly jar over each, at least an inch into the soil.

So far so good. An added benefit, I believe, will be that the scant sunlight that reaches my shaded garden will be magnified by my miniature greenhouses.

One of the lessons life teaches, if we live long enough, is that those things we have to wait for are the better for our waiting. I'm now poised between late-middle-age and downright old age, at that stage of life when the days, weeks, months, seasons, swirl by so quickly they blur together and I sometimes have to make a conscious effort to remember where in the year I am.

It seems to me, no longer involved in school schedules, that the school year just began. Yet now people are talking about graduation and summer jobs and vacation (although I know that for some, it seemed this particular school year would never end).

I'd be positively delighted if Someone In Authority announced we are going to have Christmas only every five years. Christmases come too close together when they are annual events. How wonderful it would be to wait, to plan, to look forward to that joyous season as we did when we were children.

As one grows older — old! — the pace of time becomes even more joltingly irregular. From Christmas to Christmas seems only days, but there's an eternity between the first hard green marble on the vine and a ripe homegrown tomato, sliced on mayonnaise-slathered white bread.

Refrigeration and modern marketing may make it possible to buy any vegetable any day of the year in this country, but waiting for their natural season enhances the flavor like no condiment can possibly do.

Me, I'll wait. Grown at home or bought locally: strawberries, Vidalia onions, tomatoes, blueberries, chard — did I mention Vidalias? — these are a few of my favorite things-worth-waiting-for.

Corn on the cob, for heaven's sake! The water should be boiling before one snaps the ear off the stalk, a feat that can be executed only in season.

Besides better eating, buying food that hasn't had to travel far supports the local economy and reduces energy expenditures.

And while I'm waiting, I'll plant enough parsley and carrots to let hungry butterfly babies eat their fill in my garden. For them, too, there is a season....

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