This little household of ours, comprised of two adults on the quite age-mature side, eats a lot of fruit. When we buy bananas to last us a week, we can't come away with fewer than two robust bunches. We try, when we can, to select one bunch that's fairly ripe, and a second that has yet a way to go to ripen. A month ago one of the unripened bunches just didn't ripen in the time generally allotted. A week passed, then another week and then a third week, and still the bunch of unripe bananas stubbornly refused to budge from its hard green state to anything resembling edibility.

We'd never had that experience before, Usually, and particularly through the summer months, bananas ripen quickly, so much so that sometimes we end up eating the last of them in a truly soft and ripened state that many people would just not appreciate. We don't mind, we just enjoy bananas, one for each of us at breakfast time. Weeks went by and eventually, that bunch ripened and they too were eaten, but we were just a little suspicious of the experience; bananas have to be shipped in their green state, with the expectation that in several weeks' time they would turn yellow, ripening to edibility. What happened with that bunch? Guess we'll never know, but they turned out fine.

Now, in the garden, I'm harvesting tiny ripe, sweet tomatoes, non-stop. One of the tomato plants in particular has grown to be a gigantic specimen and is flowering crazily, the resulting tomatoes ripening constantly. The other hasn't fared as well, but the tomatoes it produces, larger yellow ones are spectacularly sweet. And then there's the third tomato plant, one we hadn't deliberately planted but which arrived as a volunteer, coming out of the composter. And it is producing the type of tomatoes that we tend to put in our salads, called 'cocktail'; smaller than plum tomatoes, firmly round and with an incomparable flavour. So it too is being harvested.

Another volunteer that appeared in our garden this year is the double cornstalk that has treated us to some suspenseful interest in its maturation. The two stalks seem to have grown very swiftly, and it wasn't long before tassels appeared, and not long afterward cornsilk atop emerging corn. The first corn's silk has turned a lovely shade of pink, and newly emerging corns below the originals are making fast work of their growth opportunities. It will be fascinating to watch as they continue to grow and to ripen, and perhaps even end up on our dinner table.