High Harvest

It's that time of year again, when you look at bins of things you harvested and think about how much you have to do to get it all processed and stored for the winter. Anna took a bit of stuff of my hands on Friday when she came over and made supper. We had a great evening playing cards (she and Ian played Kaiser for the first time), but the rest of the weekend has been pretty yard oriented.

The girls were at their grandparents this weekend, so when Mike went to work on Saturday, I had the yard to myself. I picked about 6 cups of strawberries and 10 pound of tomatoes, in addition to the standard harvest tomotillos, beans, onions, herbs, chard, kohlrabi, beets and pumpkins. I am reminded of how much I like the square foot gardening method for so many of those things because I get the right amount to eat but not so much I need to freeze and can.

I also mowed the yard with the new reel mower, deadheaded the flowers and started moving some rich compost to some of my garden beds. I also dug up all my corn and the finished beans. Hauling it to the compost was a bit complicated, because we lent the wheel burrow to James.

Much of the garden is turning yellow as fall approaches, and I wanted to pull the peas, but Mike is trying to save some for seed. I also finished the watering of the boxes. We have been watering out of the girls swimming pool for two weeks - and they have been hot ones with plus 30 temperatures.

I have been waiting to finish a section of the new flower bed and connect it to the shade bed in the back under the pine tree. I started by digging up the grass and banging off the dirt from the roots. Then I added the compost to it and transplanted the remaining plants. I really wanted to start putting in all the bulbs Mom sent me, but it is still to hot and I need to wait for the first frost. Regardless, the bed looks nice - I'll just feel great when it is completely done.

We started working on some canning about 3:30. We got two boxes of crab apples from Pat and have been processing them into apple sauce using Anna's food mill. We also got a box of plums from Dana and turned those into jam. We also made some bread and a plum/strawberry crisp. We've been freezing down lots of zucchini, but still have a lot of pumpkin to deal with. We finally finished our batch of cooking about 8 pm and are feeling very pleased with ourselves. Take a look at the current yard pics and all the stuff Mike has been canning.