mid august???

I keep not posting because I mean to take pictures, or I mean to upload pictures, or I forget when I sit down at the computer, or...


It's harvest time now, a bit from the garden (I'm freezing a steady trickle of paste tomatoes in the hopes of having enough for a canning session by the end of the season) and a LOT from trees and bushes. My fig tree's fruit is ripening, and now we're inundated with fist-sized, brown-black fruit; I need to dig up recipes and figure out what I'm making with all of them. Harvest preservation! Whew. There's also been a lot of foraging: I went out with H to gather blackberries, and we got enough for her to start a five-gallon batch of wine and me to make four pints of jam. Then I went out again by myself the next week and snagged another quart of them to add to some wild-fermented mead, which is now almost ready to decant from secondary fermentation. Then last weekend we went over the hill to a nearby abandoned lot, which is apparently the remains of somebody's orchard; there are two apple trees still bearing -- enough for us to gather ten gallons of mostly-windfall fruit to press for cider -- and two tiny plum trees whose fruit is not quite ripe. Pretty sure I spotted a pear, also, but it bore no fruit, possibly due to being the last one left in the area.


In upcoming-harvest news, my tiger eye beans are producing big pods that are starting to turn brown on a few plants. Keeping an eye on those, because it would be super neat to harvest enough beans for some chili this winter. ...I'm probably *not* going to get a corn harvest, because I just planted too late; the plants are healthy but they're small, and at this point in the season they ought to be taller than I am and fluffy with silk. Lessons for next year!


Also I harvested my one little row of garbanzos, which ultimately wound up with about a handful of beans. They're not a productive enough crop for me to give them dedicated space next year, I don't think. BUT: the individual plants take up very little space, are self-supporting, and fix nitrogen. So the new plan is to just tuck them into corners between plantings of other things.

Parts of dealing with the garden are frustrating or disheartening -- trying to figure out an efficient way to manage water supply, discovering blossom end rot on the first Amish paste tomato, watching the little pear struggle with fireblight -- but some of it is just plain cool.

I honestly harvested these earlier than I would have in a perfect world; the heat this past week made the plants at the less-well-watered end of the row just keel right over. But there they are! I apparently forgot to note which variety these were, but they're lovely. Deep purple skins, creamy interiors. I planted a pound and I think I got five or six pounds back. Nowhere near enough for a winter's supply, clearly, but I'm treating this as my training wheels year. And tonight I'll make something with the ones whose skins got scraped in the digging. Maybe the purple green beans, too. Food season!