Our Garden Harvest Gains Momentum

We're harvesting. We tried a lot of new things in the vegetable garden and greenhouse this year. Heirloom tomatoes excited us most in retrospect. And I grew peppers more intensively than in five years, trusting ladybugs to do their thing. It worked.

Above are ingredients from the garden, for a two-gallon batch of tomato sauce: six kinds of tomatoes, four kinds of peppers, four kinds of garlic, three kinds of carrots and one lonely yet huge, bulbous beet. And a $10.00 bottle of wine from Costco.

Below, the ingredients have finally been put together, along with two fat onions, in the cooker:

Here 's the finished sauce, having cooked for about 100 very slow, low minutes. Two cups of basil and lemon basil were added and stirred in after it was taken off the burner:

After being blended and packed, the sauce sits next to Judy's most recent batch of raspberry jam:

I had to pull these potatoes out today. We had a very slight frost last night. But the wind came up, saving almost all the garden. These potatoes are in a corner, under some big trees, where the wind didn't save them, so they had to come up. As you can see, the red cabbages above them did fine last night. It is about a bushel of potatoes, 15% of what our crop will probably end up producing:

Carrot flowers:

Pea flowers. The peas are still producing prodigiously:

A large head of red lettuce. It is about three times the size of any you could get in a store, yet tastes incredibly succulent:

Garlic bulbs. The garlic didn't turn out nearly as well as we had hoped. It looked so good before the rains, rains, rains started in the second half of June. We're lucky we got anything:

A corn cob's silk, before being picked:

And a lunch of two luscious, small corn cobs. Eaten about 20 minutes after being picked.

Yum!