Harvest Time

It's harvest time! I've been looking forward to this season all year. Finally, I feel rich because we have so much fresh food to eat, a freezer that's getting filled, and pantry shelves getting stocked. In the past few weeks I've made a second batch of basil pesto, canned 33 lbs of tomatoes (which resulted in 15 liter and 4 pint jars filled) and dehydrated about 12 lbs; I've got cucumber's fermenting (to be canned into dill pickles next week); we've picked about 30 lbs of blackberries from the hillside above the garden (which is a one-time deal, as that area will all be pasture next year); sliced and froze 6 lbs of peaches that we got from a friend (traded for with Orrin's fruit tree pruning earlier this year); and froze 30 lbs of local, organic blueberries (which we decided to buy this year, since our plants are just getting established). We've also eaten two of our honeydew's and two watermelon's. The honeydew's were both super sweet. The first watermelon we picked too early and it was just starting to turn red inside (that was a week and a half ago). We just had another one yesterday, and it was delicious. It looks like we'll have two more honeydew's and five more watermelon's.

The lovely tomatoes in our greenhouse 

15 lbs of tomatoes, before canning them.

My first tomato canning experience

Additionally, Orrin, Zane, James, and his sons Jacob and Christopher, along with a neighbor (who's large, heavy-duty truck we rented for the occasion), gathered 300 bales of hay from a nearby farm and socked it away in the (future) yoga studio for feeding the animal's this winter. Orrin had pre-arranged to go get these bales directly off the fields, once the farmer had cut and baled them. Fortunately, the field was just a few kilometer's away, and our neighbor's truck could carry 100 bales at a time, so they were able to get all 3 loads completed in less than 4 hours. It's nice when new adventure's take less time than anticipated!

Orrin and Christopher tossing hay bales into the yoga studio, where
Zane, James and Jacob are stacking them.

Today, along with canning tomatoes and slicing peaches, we prepared another 50' garden bed. Orrin recently completed two more beds at the top of Row A, which gets us to 28 beds in that row. The bed we worked on today is Bed 2 in Row B. We'd love to complete all of Row B before winter, so that we can cover crop it and have it more fertile for next year's garden (in preparation for starting to sell more food), but I don't think we'll get it done. We'll just keep working on it as we can. We alternate between working on the garden and working on the other house, because both are a priority. We've gotten 5 windows installed upstairs in the other house, and there are 5 more upstairs and 2 or 3 small windows down in the basement.