Harvest Monday

August 4, 2014

This is the last week of blueberries and the end of strawberries is coming soon. It was a good run. I am hoping watermelons and raspberries are next on the fruit menu. I’m not as hopeful about cantaloupe this year, unfortunately 😦I actually didn’t notice this until the day after I took this photo…look in the center of the photo, behind a cantaloupe leaf. There is a dark, baby cantaloupe! I am still not holding out much hope for it ripening because if you zoom out… You can see I planted it at the base of a forest of sunflowers. There are actually two cantaloupe plants. Neither are growing very much because of all the shade they are getting!

We’re still harvesting about 2 zucchini and cucumbers each day. We are getting enough beans to eat them about 3x/week.(Another spaghetti squash was found when ripping up the corn patch.) Our tomato harvests are still going strong; though we are still letting them ‘counter-ripen’ because of the splitting.All of our red potatoes we were storing in the basement have been eaten. Now we are on to Yukon Gold and Purple potatoes. I have been harvesting the potatoes from the most shaded part of the patch to the part that gets the most sun. The question is, are they getting bigger as I pick them because they are getting more sun? or because they had more time to grow…?Even with all of our corn issues, we were still able to harvest a 5 gallon bucketful as we were cleaning out the patch.My daughter was able to harvest her first pumpkin (she kicked a pumpkin off the porch last fall…Voila!)We are continuing to harvest and dry marigolds to feed the chickens this winter. Hopefully, between these and sunflower seeds, our feed bill won’t be quite as high.

We are loving all of the free (other than seed cost), healthy (no spray, organic or otherwise) produce! 🙂 Here are some ways we consumed it this week.

We had pizza one night. One was veggie pizza with our peppers, zucchini, and tomatoes. The other was a kale (ours), artichoke pizza. We had snaps and spaghetti squash as sides.

Another night, we had bean burgers, roasted potatoes, steamed corn and snaps, and zucchini quiche. Everyone had already started to dig in before I remembered to snap a picture 🙂 This is easily my favorite meal and seeing how everyone asked for seconds, I don’t think they hate it too much either 😉 Head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions to see what everyone else was able to harvest this week!