The past few days have been busy ones for me as I try to make use of all the vegetables which seem to have ripened all at once in my garden. After two full years with no garden due to selling a home and moving to a brand new one where I literally had to start from the ground up, I am so pleased to once again walk out my back door and pick something for dinner — 30 minutes before we eat. So, really, I’m not complaining, but I do need to expand my collection of recipes which call for beans, tomatoes, squash, peppers and eggplants. And even though this spring I kept reminding myself that there were just two of us around consistently to eat whatever I planted, our small garden managed to kick into high gear in the last month and surpass any hope of keeping up with its output. This past week I’ve processed and frozen bags and bags of string and runner beans, and my nieces and nephews will be receiving care packages at college with at least one loaf of zucchini bread in each. Yesterday I assembled four pans of moussaka (a Vanikiotis family recipe) for the freezer — the second such production in a month — just to keep up with what until the middle of August were two very unimpressive eggplant plants. Six very large specimens went into each of the two batches I’ve made, and right now there are at least a dozen shiny purple orbs of various sizes growing and making me wonder whether maybe at least one could be a substitute for a Halloween jack o’lantern. It seems our cool, wet, late spring slowed everything down, and now some surprisingly warm (90 degree) fall days have urged everything out there to ripen at once. As I gather tomatoes by the basketful and check the zucchini plant at least twice daily to avoid finding a squash the size of a baseball bat, I remind myself that some dreary winter day I will open the freezer or pull a jar from the pantry and be oh-so-glad of this wealth of home-grown goodness. Yes, it’s good to have a garden again. — Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor