We went out today to pull beets to pickle and can.  While we were at it we began to check the rest of the garden.  The fun part was getting to eat two whole strawberries.  The patch is a disaster but there were two very sweet and very red strawberries for a Saturday morning snack!  We weeded the Asparagus and then started picking eggplant.  Wow they have recovered and we will be having many different eggplant dinners here shortly.

Remember these?  These are the peppers that were completely stripped during the first of the hail storms this spring.

They have since recovered pretty well and this is what we picked from them today:  Purple Beauty, Green Bell, Anaheim, Serrano and a couple of Poblanos.  The Jalapeños are not doing well but this is just the start of the harvest.  Stuffed and grilled peppers!  Yum!

The Acorn Squash have also survived and have taken over.  There are several dozen on their way to ripening.  We may actually get a Butternut Squash or two as well, but those poor things really took a beating during the storms.

The Black Beans are doing their thing, some of the potatoes are dying back which means we will have to go out and see if any actually made potatoes.  The Amaranth is HUGE.  I’ll post pictures later but we are going to have to cut the seed heads off and get those stored.  The onion harvest looks like it is going to be very good as well.  The corn?  Meh.  We’ll see but it appears that we have a soil deficiency of one kind or another.  They are getting ears but they are small and the plant itself is kind of a lighter green.  This, at first glance, tells me its nitrogen.  I’m going to have soil samples done in the fall so we will know more then.

This is our project for the rest of the day:  Pickling and canning about 30 lbs of beets.  Hope they don’t taste like crap because we have at least twice as many than pictured here.  We do use them quite a bit in our juicer too.  As I write, the chickens are chowing down on the greens!

So on our counter today we have a chicken thawing, 2 dozen eggs gathered this morning, summer squash and Zucchini, Acorn Squash, Carrots, Beets, Peppers, Eggplant, and home made bread.  All from the farm!  What a tough growing season this has been!  So very nice to see things maturing in spite of it all.