Yesterday's haul

My cornucopia

I used my bicycle basket to gather all the veggies. It's pretty deep. Although you don't see all the string beans here, I collected a full pound of 'em, plus cucumbers that are mostly hidden from view.

I spent some time yesterday cooking a 4-pound spaghetti squash in the microwave. After it cooled, I used a fork to tease the strands of squash free from the rind and filled two quarter-sized freezer bags with it.

My freezer "larder" is becoming quite full with excess from the garden, including that spaghetti squash, tomatoes, chunks of zucchini and wineberries.

There's a nearby farm where someone I know invited me to help myself to the (organic!) peaches growing there (on a single tree). I collected a small bag of moldy, green and hard peaches last week. I dropped them on the kitchen counter and forgot about them for a week.

I checked on them yesterday and they were suddenly very ripe. Two had to be thrown away. I decided to adapt my late grandmother's recipe for apple crisp, substituting the peaches and a bag of frozen wineberries I'd collected in July.  The peach skins, partly covered with unappetizing black spots, had to be skinned, and I did find one small worm crawling up my hand as I washed them. It was a messy job, but one doesn't come across organic peaches that often.

The peach/wineberry crisp, however, turned out great and was well worth the effort. I like to add raisins and walnuts to the oatmeal mix.

Thinking About All the Lovin' Spoonfuls to Come

 Spaghetti Squash on the Vine

Zucchini

Wineberries

Current garden pickings include zucchini and wineberries, which grow in abundance in the back of my property. How much I pick is limited only by my energy level on a given day. Of course, I always don my hip boots, acquired for me by my sister as a (requested) birthday gift, as tick protection as I wade into the brambles.

I've picked about 12 cups of wineberries so far, rinsing, air drying and then freezing most of them for winter use on my breakfast cereal. The season is brief, lasting only a few weeks.

I believe I'm up to about 8 or 9 zucchinis picked, with many given away.

There are 4 or 5 spaghetti squash like the first image above forming like fat loaves of bread on the hay. They can't be picked until they mature in the fall and turn yellow. Right now, they're a virginal shade of white.

I'm waiting (not so patiently) for tomatoes, string beans, acorn squash, cucumbers and potatoes.

Like last year, I'm tracking everything I harvest so that I can ultimately estimate with a fair degree of accuracy the retail value of my organic produce, based on what Shop Rite would charge for the equivalent in the store.

Thank god for today's rain; it was so needed. My soaker hose, which allows water to trickle into the ground slowly instead of splashing the leaves, inviting disease, burst a small pinhole into a much bigger hole. I bought a repair kit but haven't gotten around to using it yet. I also had a plumber over here today to fix a leaky fitting on my water tank, which supplies the well water for my outdoor water use. (It doesn't supply drinking water anymore as it's a shallow well and i have since hooked up to municipal water supply.) The bill was $192. Ouch. But now I can water my garden again without that well pump cycling on and off every 2 minutes.