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.

Gardening in a Drought

So with July having been the hottest month since 1871 according to Paul Poteet, our garden has had mixed results.  We watered every couple days since planting late in May.  However, with a vacation at the beginning of July and concern over running the well dry, we have backed off that schedule.

Our peas didn't tolerate the heat well and we only ate a few ripe ones while standing in the garden.  We had good results from our lettuce, but didn't continue to pick it enough and it has all gone bitter.  The radishes did well and we pickled quite a few along with some "non-garden" vegetables like cauliflower, carrots, and asparagus.  You can see them in this picture as they age amongst my collection of growlers.

Cucumber and zucchini seem to be the hit of the garden and we are working hard on keeping up with new ways to cook zucchini before it gets bad.  We pickled seven quarts of cucumbers just this week, using dill from our herb garden and garlic from our own garden.  Fairly self sufficient, wouldn't you say?

Finally we ate sweet corn out of our garden this week too.  The first couple dozen ears we probably waited too long, so we froze most of that for use in winter soups.  The second batch we picked was exactly what we hoped for; tender, sweet, juicy corn on the cob!

Tomatoes and green peppers are coming along nicely now too.  We made a small batch of salsa with the first pickings, and have been eating tomatoes with about every meal this week.  In my future I foresee a lot of tomato canning.

We are still waiting on our carrots, and our green beans.  We watered again because our beans have flowered and we think we are only days away from a tremendous crop.  More updates to come as August arrives on the east half of the southwest quarter.