Fall harvest

I finally stopped putting it off. Yesterday was supposed to be around 66 degrees, and the rest of the week cool and rainy. I pretty much had to do it yesterday otherwise I might never get to it before winter. And you can see in the first photo how overgrown everything is – we sucked at weed control this year and we had volunteer tomatoes that the husband let continue to grow instead of hacking them back to keep the garden neat and tidy. Our garden has it’s own eco system of bugs and spiders which, naturally, I have a love/hate relationship with.

I pulled out the carrier and wore the kid in that while I picked tomatoes. At least for a little while before the extra weight of him got to be too much for my knees (this morning we found out he’s 11.5 pounds, so it’s no wonder!). Those tomatoes weren’t supposed to be that small. They were supposed to be San Marzano tomatoes. Clearly, they’re not. I’m highly disappointed, of course. We plant 2.5 beds of tomatoes – one for sauce, one for sandwich tomatoes, and one plant for the tiny salad ones. And you know what we don’t need? 3 plants full of tiny freaking tomatoes! (We also don’t need 2.5 beds of tomatoes, but the husband insists and then I’m left trying to figure out just what I’m going to do with it all.) It looks like I’ll be ordering a new pack of seeds to start this year since the pack from this last year was mislabeled. Ugh.

I’m attempting to dehydrate a batch of the tomatoes to see how they do (either for use in snacks or cooking, we’ll see). Other than that I’m not really sure what to do with them. The peppers will easily get used up – they’re always the thing we use the most of from the garden. The green tomatoes… I don’t even know. You can only eat so many fried green ones. I could maybe freeze them, but then I’d have to admit that I have freezer bags of tomatoes in the deep freezer outside from… 4 years ago? Things go out to that freezer and then end up forgotten about.

We ended up with monster beets this year. Every year I’ve tried to grow them (because I love them very much) and I rarely ever have any success. Most years none of them ever come up. This year 2 came up in the spring, but by then I was so tired and not in the mood to mess with the garden so I ignored it. I figured maybe it would go to seed so I could save seeds for next year (with the idea that maybe, just maybe the seeds would actually grow this time). We never got any seeds from it – instead I ended up with two giant monster beets that I’m not even sure are going to be edible. I haven’t yet attempted to cut one with a knife yet. I’m going to assume they’re woody and gross inside. It looks like two seeds did happen to germinate late in the season, so we have a small and a normal sized beet as well. I feel like I should give up on my beet dreams, but every year I tell myself “this will be the year!” and it never is. Chances are I’ll try to plant beets again next year. And chances are I’ll be incredibly disappointed all over again.