The Bountiful Harvest

Here is my harvest from yesterday.  Another good day in the old truck patch yielded green beans, carrots, cucumbers, zucchini, onions, tomatoes, and green peppers.  If only I didn't have a day job and four kids, the tomato harvest would be much better.  I bet as many as picked are already rotten because I didn't get to them soon enough.

I don't know if this picture does it justice, but a full size grocery bag is 2/3 full of green beans.  Again, my tardiness in harvesting resulted in a few undesirables, but I still yielded 7 quarts of canned beans and a four gallon bowl of fresh beans in the fridge.

Here are the good, or at least partially good tomatoes.  I'm running seriously low on canning jars, so I think there will be a lot of fresh tomatoes eaten in the next week.  Really wishing I had signed up for the farmers market!

 We have eaten quite a few cucumbers, and yesterday's harvest was substantial.  So I made 8 pints of pickles.  These are garlic dill, and half of them have a dried habanero pepper in the bottom.  We have a quart jar with a habanero that is ready to eat.  I am waiting for Uncle John and Aunt Linda to visit to open that up and see how well we like it.

This is my carrot harvest.  Funny, it looks like a couple more cucumbers slipped in with them.  Kind of like in the garden where the green bean vines are climbing the tomato plants and mixing in with the sweet potato vines.  Note to self, more spacing next year.

I am excited about this first harvest of carrots because it means my picky eater, Logan, will finally enjoy something we grew.  Grace is picky too, but likes a fresh carrot.  Definitely a side dish on tonight's diner menu.

The only thing ready that I don't have pictures of is our sweet potatoes.  They are still in the ground, as that is where they will keep the best until we need to eat them.  Next time I'm out in the garden, I'll snap a shot of them as they are bursting out of the ground they are so big.

We must truly be blessed with good earth, because after all the dry weather in June and July, we still are managing a bountiful harvest.  We don't want it to go to waste, so if you are nearby, come visit and I'll send you home with some.  The food tastes better when grown on the east half of the southwest quarter.