Happy Harvest

Well, the garden and orchard are winding down, I'm in full scale harvest-n-store-it-before-its-good-for-nuthin-but-the-compost mode now, gardenwise.

The veggie garden is about done, I only have to pull up the carrots and start winterizing the veggie beds.

The grapes are all harvested, thanks to DH, had a had a bumper crop there. All the green grapes are juiced, the seedless grapes are raisined, and there's only about 15 pounds of concord grapes left to juice.

Progress report on the rest of the garden this year:

Berries
Rasberries: had more than I could handle, literally. After about three weeks I just stopped harvesting them and pretended they weren't there anymore, the birds could have the rest. I don't even remember how many quarts of raspberries I juiced or froze whole, it was a heap.

Blueberries: The bushes are still too young to produce more than a dozen berries each. But I didn't kill any bushes this year, that's the good news.

Elderberries: I've managed to keep the four new bushes alive this summer through the dry dry dry spell, we'll see how they do next spring, they're supposed to be quick growers.

Home Orchard
Cherries: had an excellent crop for the first time since we moved in. Got lots of sour cherries for pies (they are goooooood, too) and got about three pounds of sweet cherries which is all the birds left us. I took one pound and made cherry brandy, we ate the rest.

Pears: I think I got maybe three pecks of pears, not a good year. They are great pears though, I'm pretty sure they're Barlett and nothing, nothing beats the taste of these home grown pears.

Apples: Had a good crop this year, made up three LARGE batches of applesauce already from the windfall apples and the bird-bitten ones. There are four boxes of apples currently waiting to be dried or cored/peeled/sliced into quart jars for cooking later.

Plum: still no love from the plum. It flowered like mad this spring so I can only assume it needs a mate nearby to pollinate and isn't getting the love.

Fig: the tender little sapling looks good, but I think I got the wrong variety for our weather. I got the Brown Turkey AKA Texas Everbearing but I keep hearing from some that it does well up here and from others that it's not warm enough long enough for that variety. I dunno.

Veggie Garden
What did poorly:
peas
spinach
cabbage
cucumbers
green beans
peppers--bell, habanero, jalapeno, none of em
green onions

What did so-so
radishes
tomatoes

What did well:
carrots
lettuce
leeks/polish garlic or whateverthehellthosethingsare

I'm not really happy with the progress in my veggie gardening. I only got enough roma tomatoes to make two quarts of spaghetti sauce and enough slicing tomatoes to make three quarts of salsa. I'm having trouble with tomatoes.

But the volunteer pumpkins were the break out hit of the summer. On the old compost heap I got a whole bunch of mystery squash popping up so I thinned it out to seven plants and let them go, just to see what they'd be...they're good ol' fashioned pumpkins. There was another volunteer pumpkin plant in the backyard among the roses, don't ask me how it got there. Nice big pumpkin on it, though. If I'm remembering right we have about 10 of them out there. We'll carve some into jackolanterns in a few weeks!

So the harvest is almost all in, I'm no where near close to having "put up" the apples, almost done with the grapes, and need to get to the carrots.

But let me tell you, making my own raisins has been a blast. I told the ladies at knitting circle that I feel like Laura Ingalls now--I've made raisins. One more tray of them on the dehydrator at the moment along with two trays of applesauce getting turned into fruit leather.

Onward and forward...

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