This summer has turned out to the busiest in my life.
And I didn’t even have a baby this summer.
Between vacations, visitors, general summer playing there was the farm.
The farm.
My wonderful farm.
The first part of the summer there was a lot of cultivating, planting, watering, waiting and weeding. Then in mid-July we turned the corner to a lot of harvesting, preserving, noxious weed control, weeding and weeding and more weeding. The best part of it was that harvesting. While at this point I will say our harvest has been minimal, there is quite the learning curve out here in the desert, there have been bounties. The green beans have been plentiful, I stopped counting at 80 pounds, and we have bottled about 70 quarts. Beets did wonderfully, as did carrots, chard, onions and of course zucchini! All of which have been carefully put away for future use.
My larder is filling up
and that makes me happy.
I struggled with tomatoes this year, the harvest is going to be minimal at best, I will have to buy tomatoes this year to bottle, and I was hoping not to. The heirloom tomatoes, so lovingly grown from seed, have been a huge disappointment, only a handful of tomatoes set; I think the combination of them being heirloom and the record hot summer spelled disaster for them. I will try again next year. I did plant some hybrid roma tomatoes, and while they did a tad better it’s still not enough for what I need.
Cucumbers are ok, I am waiting for cooler weather in hopes they pick up more, and Sassy is set on making pickles this fall. They were planted in an area that has pretty barren soil; it is going to take a lot of work and time to get our garden soil richer and therefore more productive.
It’s been a wonderful summer.
Tomatoes have been hit hard this year everywhere. 🙁
I really think it was all that heat so early on, they couldn’t set fruit 🙁
That will also mean that it may be hard to find them to can, or that they will be more expensive this year.
Our tomatoes went crazy this year. We started with 16 plants (4 grape tomatoes, 4 Celebrity, and 8 Roma). I think we lost 2 plants, one Roma and one Grape. But the remaining plants probably have 200 fruit or more per plant. It is crazy. Salsa and tomato juice either this week or next week!!
This was the first summer in 12 years that we did NOT have a garden:( altho it was heartbreaking- I knew that I didn’t have the strength and we didn’t have the time to do it.