Playing in the Dirt

Uh oh.  I forgot to post yesterday.  You'll forgive me, though, right?  I mean, I think I've blogged every day in October except for my one weekend day off.  VeganMoFo is tough! 

It was so nice to sleep in this morning.  I switched pillows about a week ago and since then I've been sleeping better and been dreaming more (or at least remembering them).  After waking up I headed out to the garden for some harvesting.  I've been avoiding thinking about it, but pretty soon it'll be time to prepare the garden for winter :(  

I figured I'd better get started harvesting and preserving more food.  Although carrots will do just fine in cold weather, they are much harder to harvest when the ground is hard!  So I picked about 1/3 of them.

Aren't they gorgeous!?!

There's nothing like a fresh carrot.  I didn't even have to taste them to know they were flavorful.  As soon as I pulled one from the earth, the sweet smell of carrots filled the air.  Sure, some of them have 3 legs or odd lumps- but that's the beauty of homegrown carrots.  They are WAY more interesting than carrots from the grocery store.  I have about 5 pounds of them tucked away in my crisper now.

I also dug up the potato bed and 1/2 of the remaining beets.  I was a bit disappointed that I only got about 7 pounds of potatoes from the bed I planted.  I really should have dug them in deeper, but I was kinda lazy about planting them.  Oh well.  Now that I know how perfect and well drained the soil is in that part of the yard, I'll do better next year.

Today I got about 2 pounds of beets and greens- I'll harvest the rest later.  Since I'm the only one in the family who likes beets, I don't want to harvest too much!  I sauteed the greens with garlic and lemon and the beet roots are roasting with some of the little carrots as I type. 

Billie likes how the beets smell.

Of course, there were also more tomatoes, tomatillos, and peppers to harvest.  Seven pounds of tomatoes, 1 pound of tomatillos, and just shy of 1 pound of chiles/peppers to be exact.  

I'm starting to worry about how many green tomatoes I still have on the vine and how cool the weather is getting.  I still have pickled green tomatoes from 2 years ago, so I'm not sure I can preserve any more!  Perhaps a fried green tomato party?  Last year we were able to ripen most of our green ones in the kitchen...until Mike tripped and fell on the box and squished them all!  I was sad to lose the tomatoes, but it was really funny, too.

Overall it was a great harvest today, but there is a lot of work to be done in the next few weeks to make sure we get the most out of the garden.  I'll be sure to keep posting about it!