Celery has been a stable crop for us.

It seems that every year there are one or two vegetables that out-do the others in our garden. One time the tomatoes produced enough sauce to last a full year; hot peppers from last year are still hanging from my ceiling, now alongside the new crop; back in '93 we had so many pumpkins that we fed half of them to the critters.

On the flip-side, a crop that we count on sometimes fails miserably. Most of this season's tomatoes got eaten by our five turkeys when the birds found a hole in the garden fence! Slugs invaded the cabbage patch once and Gin threw all the heads into the compost pile rather than pick the slimy things out. We've since learned to soak the heads in salt water and to cut them in quarters before cooking or blanching. And we now know that to keep slugs out of the garden you can use tobacco stem meal, wood ashes or a mulch of oak leaves, among other tried and true methods.

Two bushels of potatoes had to be thrown away because of scab a few years back. Here in northeastern Pennsylvania the soil is highly acidic so I added lime to bring it back toward neutral. I guess I spread it too thick on the potato patch.

Celery has always been a very stable crop for us. All my friends and relatives say they don't even try to grow it because it's a pain to blanch. We start the seedlings inside and move them to the greenhouse (actually a large coldframe attached to the south wall of the tool shed) when they get about two inches tall. The plants get a couple of weeks to build their roots, then we surround them with a one-quart milk carton. They really shoot up after the cartons are added.

The cartons are usually saved for us by Gin's mom, who starts collecting them around Christmas (I think the egg nog cartons begin the collection). We don't buy very much milk from the store with two cows in the barn. I cut three edges of the bottom of the carton with a utility knife, fold it back, pop it over the plant, then cover the flap and part of the carton with dirt to hold it in place. I told the neighbor kids that we grew milk!

To harvest, we simply pull the whole thing up, slide the carton off and cut the roots off, leaving the cleanest bunch of celery you ever saw. This year's plot measured 4'x8' and grew a wheelbarrow full of celery.

Gin used to freeze most of the crop until we bought a dehydrator last fall. The wheelbarrow full of celery now sits in a one gallon jar in the pantry, saving precious space in the freezers for meat. We use the celery in almost all our roasts, stuffings, stews and soups.