Harvest season makes me happy

Harvest season is in full-tilt right now! It was so much fun to pull all our winter squash and pumpkins in, and weigh them with our new 70 lb hanging scale (it's my current favorite kitchen gadget). We have a whopping 220 lbs of winter squash and pumpkins. The big winners are the spaghetti squash, weighing in at a total of 86 lb! So awesome! I am actually starting to believe that we may feed ourselves this winter. We've picked all our dry beans and have shelled most of them. We had planted black turtle beans, light red kidney beans, and yellow kinearly beans. We realized that we didn't plant nearly enough dry beans, and will probably devote at least one whole row to them next year. We still have pole beans to pick, but they haven't dried yet.

We continue to process tomatoes (we picked 25 lbs more today), of which we are drying some right now, and will can the remaining picked tomatoes tomorrow. There are still a lot on the vine that are ripening, so it'll be interesting to see how long they last in the greenhouse before we have to pull the plants into the house to finish.

We had a surprise volunteer tomatillo plant that gave me enough to make a big batch of roasted tomatillo salsa with, and we munched heavily on that for a couple of weeks. I hear that once tomatillos are in your garden, they'll come up every year on their own – I sure hope so!

Last week my parents were visiting, and while they were here we used a borrowed grinder and press to juice a whole bunch of apples, probably about 1 bushelful. We drank a bit of the juice, but took most of it and reduced it down to apple syrup, which we are now using on pancakes and oatmeal. It turns out that we cooked it down a little too far, and it is more jelly-like than syrup, which just tells us that next time we don't have to cook it as long and should end up with more syrup! It's tasty stuff. This week, we juiced about the same amount again, but put the juice into a fermenter, and are going to try our hand at making hard cider. That requires some patience, it seems, as it won't actually be ready to bottle for 4 or 5 months, and then you have to let it sit for another month or two, I think. I so hope it's worth it!

Also while my parents were visiting, my mom took several of our eggplants and made a big pan of moussaka – so delicious! Food seems to taste so much better when we grow it or know where it comes from. I am so grateful for all the food that we have harvested, and will continue to harvest, and will appreciate it through the winter.