Well, it's August. That means school is coming around again. It means it's supposed to be blazing hot outside. It means tomatoes should be turning red...and they are. Remember back with me to the spring when I planted way too many tomato plants from seed. Remember with me how I didn't care for them and most of the first batch died. Remember with me that I did successfully start from seed 4 Brandywine plants and 4 Jelly Bean plants. Well, I've only enjoyed 2 jelly bean tomatoes so far. This first picture is the first harvest of tomatoes.....off the plants that I didn't plant on purpose. I have 5 plants that started growing on their own, and they're doing phenomenally well! You will only see 10 tomatoes in the picture because Ainsley helped me get them. I set her down with one zucchini, and went after the tomatoes. She tried to eat the stem of the zucchini, which was pretty funny. I put 12 tomatoes in front of her, turned around for 30 seconds to pick the other two zucchinis and I laughed at what I saw. She had bitten and spit out the first tomato, but she was going in for another!!!! She's like a bull, she loves the color red. I've tried giving her tomatoes again, but she spits it right out. I think she gets the texture thing from her mama, but I didn't like tomatoes as a kid either.
We have probably picked about 6-7 dozen tomatoes! No joke. We've used them all so far with different recipes. My favorite super simple one was dicing them up, adding some garlic salt, and spreading it on buttered toast. Refreshing!
We've picked about 10 zucchinis so far, using all but two of them at this point. Some top recipes for these has been the zucchini cakes mentioned last time and the chocolate zucchini bread we made for Sunday school. Oddly, Rachel wanted to make it, and then never even tried it. One of our pastors said it's the only way to make zucchini taste good. :-)
The next picture is some lovely homegrown goodness from our friends John and Amber. They have some peach trees in their backyard, and it's way too many peaches for them to eat themselves. It's pretty rough being their friends and HAVING to take them off their hands. I ate about 5 peaches the day they brought them, and then cut all these up the next day, finishing them off on day 3. They didn't last long. Thankfully, they brought another bag this week too since they were blown off with the last storm that came through this past weekend. I'm trying to savor them this time. Ainsley is definitely my daughter though; she polished off 2 peaches all by herself. (Oh, I also saved a seed or two to try planting a tree for us too.)
One other amazing surprise from the garden this year: remember how 5 tomato plants are growing that I didn't plant on purpose? Well, I had a couple potato plants do the same thing. I dug up 2 decent-sized potatoes yesterday, and I didn't even plant them! That was really cool. I also harvest the beets, which only produced one fairly small beet and four tiny things. So if I choose to grow them again I'll look for growing tips.
We received about 50 carrots the other week, from my mom's garden. They tasted just as good as the full sized carrots from the store, but knowing where they came from made them even better. I just need to find a good way to make them last longer than a week in the fridge, because I can only eat so many carrots in such a short amount of time.
I'm also hoping to grow more diversity next year with more root crops and different things. I also intend to plant them at the right time and give them what they need. We'll see if I can actually follow through with that though!
Thanks for reading. Time to eat.
-mister-
