Harvest Time

Its that time of the year again, harvesting of the garden.  Yesterday was a full day of harvesting, as it seems many of the veggies and fruit ripen all at once.

I canned 11 pints of green beans last week, and this is what we picked again this week.

Potatoes didn't do so well, I think I need to address how they get watered. These were volunteer plants that came up from not getting all the potatoes out of the ground from the prior year.  I'm also thinking that volunteer plants don't produce as well as newly planted potato eyes.  Gardening at my house is always trial and error.  

These are honey crisp apples, the best apples in my humble opinion.  My little dwarf tree over produced this year, and the weight of the apples, broke the trunk.  I will have to replace this one and start over.  Having to get a new apple tree, will spur me to finally get some other fruit tress and build a mini orchard.

My husband and I are originally from New Mexico, and we love hot chili peppers, especially the anihiem green peppers.  Grown here, they don't have as much heat, but they have good flavor.  It doesn't stay consistently hot enough here in the Northwest to create the heat in the pepper.  The little yellow one are Hungarian yellow hots.  They have a nice bite to  them!

Also, last week I canned 13 pints of salsa and 9 quarts of stewed tomatoes, and they just keep coming,   I am putting this batch in the freezer, until I have enough to can some more.   

My strawberries are prolific this year.  I pick this amount, about two quarts, every three to four days.  I can't remember the specific type of strawberry plant that I bought, but they are ever bearing type.  I am so surprised they are doing so well, as I had about 20 leftover plants that I didn't know where to put them, so I just stuck them in a garden bed at the back of the property, that was just plain dirt and straw over it to keep the weeds out.  I stuck the strawberry plants in the straw, and watered them.  The first year yielded very little, but I didn't get back to them during this spring, and they anchored in and just took off with yummy strawberries all the time.

This is just a small sample of the carrot harvest this year.  I pull about this much or a little more each week to eat fresh.  I plant enough to harvest throughout the winter.  I just put some straw on top of them and pull what we will eat each week.  

I didn't even get to my neighbors house to pick plums.  She has a bumper crop this year.

So it goes, another great garden year with good produce!

Warmest...