Harvest

Wow, it's been a month since I last posted! It's hard to believe that much time has gone by already. We've been harvesting things from the long planting beds next to the north fence, which helps mitigate the damage to the greens bed from the neighbors' household cleaner a few weeks ago.

I've gotten a wonderful harvest of edible snow peas this year--and I'm actually still getting a few, though they're nearly done now. This was an heirloom variety called mammoth snow pea; they grow very tall and produce long into the season. We'll definitely be growing them next year; their sprout rate was almost perfect. Beans in the north beds are coming on, as are cucumbers, so soon I'll need to be pickling cukes and canning beans. I can't freeze much more right now, as we still haven't managed to clean out the garage enough for a new chest freezer yet--but we'll have to soon as our beef will be ready in a month or two.

The tomato plants are busily making nice tomatoes, but I'm not sure all the Amish Paste tomatoes are actually Amish Paste. Some look different from others, as though maybe someone at the seed company made a mistake and some are a different variety. Oh, well. They look good, anyway, and I'm sure we'll be able to eat them, so no big deal. The Principe Borghese look great--about the size of small apricots and a nice tangy taste even after being dehydrated. I'll dehydrate most of these, except for the ones we use on pizzas over the next month or two. This particular heirloom variety is the one touted as being best for making sun-dried tomatoes, although I did not sun-dry them. I used the dehydrator. Much faster.

We've also gotten what little broccoli was available, but I'll be removing the plants from the bed soon, to give the beans more room and sun. We've got nice sweetmeat squash coming on as well, growing right out of the mound underneath the apple tree, easily watered from the lawn sprinklers. And a volunteer red winter kale has been producing nicely, which also helps mitigate the greens damage. The largest eggplant is getting a flower finally, and there are peppers on some of the pepper plants I put in between the tomato plants, so we'll at least get a few of those.

The greatest gift of all was a windfall of some free apricots--very small ones, but lots of them, from a big old giant tree that was probably planted near an old farmhouse long ago. There are enough of these sweet little fruits, maybe, to help satisfy my older daughter's craving for apricot jam, though they're far too ripe to process as anything but jam or fruit leather. I'm still hoping for some apricots and peaches to can just as fruit in light syrup, rather than making into jam. But at least the jam for this year will be taken care of, much to my relief. The kids won't feel anywhere near as fruit-deprived over the winter if they can still get strawberry or apricot jam or fruit leather from time to time. And there are always the winter apples, which usually hold out a long time--leaving only a tiny gap between the last of them and the first of the strawberries.

All in all, it isn't too bad a harvest, even with the earlier garden mishap.