Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Harvest

Thanks, everyone, for your kind thoughts about Dave. Len is actually doing pretty well with this. Rather than beating himself up for any imagined lost opportunities, he's remembering the good, raucous times he had when Dave was around. That's unusual enough.

In the meantime, the garden has been ripening! We've been doing this garden thing for three years now, and it never fails to amaze me that from a few seeds and small plants we get pounds and pounds of tomatoes, beans, and peppers.

Tomatoes and Purple Beans

This is my first major harvest. The Supersweet 100s started ripening last week and the purple beans started coming in this weekend. I've turned this basket of tomatoes into dried tomatoes (and re-filled the basket):

Dried Tomatoes

Not Sun Dried -- it's much too humid for that -- we have a food drier which works perfect for this endeavor. I think this year I will cover these in olive oil.

And watermelon are coming, too. We went from this early this month, to this:

Watermelon

Bigger than before, but still quite small. It seems we planted "personal" watermelons. For comparison:

Comparative Watermelons

On the left is a normal sized small watermelon*, on the right, the one from our garden (I checked the tag, this really is the right size).

* Yes, Stef, this is the same melon your husband brought over several weeks ago. No, we haven't eaten it. We're planning a shoot-out. With pictures. Don't ask, it's Len's idea.

I'm keeping track of how much we pick and what we do with the produce. It sounds really nerdy, but I think it will help us not to over or under plant. For the record, so far we have four pounds of the Sweet 100 tomatoes and 1 pound of purple beans. I am going to be very busy this fall!

1 comment:

Valerie said...

REAL Cherry tomatoes and not those silly grape things they call tomatoes in the grocery store!!!???? I'll be right over!!

Seriously...a lovely mouthwatering picture. Would be nice if a little more rain would come our way.

Have you read Barbara Kingsolver's new book: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle...it should be very relevant to you right now.