A Good Harvest

Grig was pretty amazing over the last couple of months. Kevin and I were out of town from half-way through July until the 2nd week of September. While we were gone, he kept up with the garden and tried to keep the house clean.

Our garden has done quite well this year. While I was gone, Grig blanched and froze quite a few green beans. By the time I got back, our garden, and especially our tomatoes had exploded.

The second day after I got home, Kevin and I went outside and harvested quite a few things from our garden. My little guy is a great helper!

Here he is with the fruits of our labors.

 This is only the beginning of our tomatoes, though it is about the end of the beans. There is one onion in there too. We made a half batch of salsa with these tomatoes, and it turned out super well! I made two and a half quarts of salsa. The half quart we just ate right away, and the brother in laws really liked it too.

In the corner of the previous picture, you can also see some tiny plums. Early this year, we found a wild plum tree (with three inch thorns) on our property. The plums were tiny, like cherries, and recently they've ripened to orange. We tried a couple, and they were pretty tart. However, on one random branch, we found some purple ones that were very sweet. It was kind of strange, but we're not complaining too much. We might try to turn them into jam.

 Our garden isn't very big yet (though we have great plans for expanding next year), so we only had five stalks of corn, but we got some pretty good ears off of them. They tasted amazing. I love corn on the cob, and I was excited that the corn waited until I got home before we picked it.

Nothing, however, compared to our carrots.

 They were huge! I'm still working on cutting them up, blanching them, and freezing them. We definitely don't want these bad boys to go to waste! The biggest ones were nearly the size of my wrist. They were pretty huge! I don't think I've ever seen carrots this big.

Then, on Monday, my sister called and asked me if I wanted to go and pick tomatoes with her. Even though we have quite a few tomatoes in our garden, most of them are green, and we really like salsa, so I told her I did, and I was able to get a bushel of (orange) Roma tomatoes for $20. We picked them ourselves. We also got a whole lot of bell peppers. I'm probably going to be making salsa today because quite a few of them are ripe now. We love salsa.

I'm super grateful that we've had such a good harvest this year. Our apple tree is doing really well too, but the apples aren't ripe yet. Once they are, we're going to be making a lot of apple sauce, dehydrated apples, and apple juice. Every year, we also make fresh pressed cider. The place where my aunt is living has a cider press, and all the family in the area goes over and helps press tons of apples into cider. It always tastes amazing, and I'm really grateful that they invite us.

Hopefully it doesn't freeze too soon. I'm excited for all of our tomatoes to ripen as well. I'm really hoping they do so before it gets too cold.

Bounteous Harvest

Before we left, Kevin and I also picked some of our pie cherries. We found quite a few of them. 

Kevin ate many of them raw, we froze a few, and gave some away. 

After returning from working in Idaho, we found our garden overflowing.

It rained nearly every day we were gone, which made our plants really shoot up. The tomato plant we have has really exploded (in a good way).

So, yesterday, Kevin and I went out to pick some vegetables.

We were pleased to find that we had quite a few pea pods that were ripe for the pickin'. The lettuce harvest was also quite large.

We picked peas and cut off lettuce, and then we came inside to wash them.

The lettuce, after it was washed and the bad pieces cut off, filled four bread bags.

The peas didn't give us nearly as much, but Kevin sure enjoyed pulling them out of their pods, and I sure enjoyed eating them. Next to corn on the cob, fresh peas are my favorite thing from the garden.

They're pretty much gone today, but we still have plenty of lettuce. Luckily we have a few friends who are happy to take some bags off of our hands. We can't eat that much lettuce! 

We used a five leaf blend, so it's a good assortment of lettuce in our bags. 

We've been super blessed. I'm pretty excited that our garden is doing so well. We look forward to eating more fresh vegetables over the next few months.