Start of the major harvest...

So my Jeep is in the shop till at least Monday, so I'm not going anywhere....  which gives me a lot more time to work in the garden this weekend.... actually I needed to with being gone in PA a couple weeks ago, it put me behind in some garden tending....

So figured it was time to massively harvest some of the veggies before they go bad.  Corn & beans were the major ones.  I picked an entire bucket full of the Blue Lake bush beans, which ended up as 4 one-gallon bags of beans for the freezer.  I still have to pick the Blue Kentucky pole beans and the Trail of Tears black pole beans (altho I think I'm gonna harvest them as dried beans for winter storage).

 

Mo helped out a BUNCH today.  She picked all the corn, at least that she could find.  With the 3-Sister garden that I planted... the beans and even some of the squash climbing up the corn stalks had so much weight that it made some of the stalks bend over... so we might find a few more ears once we start picking the pole beans.   I was able to process 4 quart bags and 1 gallon freezer bags of corn today.  This is in addition to the 8 quart bags I put in the freeze a week ago. 

What a messy messy process!!

Mo also picked all the ripe tomatoes for me today...  the island is almost completely full!  We enjoyed one of them for our lunch, so so good!!  I'm hoping tomorrow to be able to make a few batches of salsa to can for winter use.  We seem to go thru the salsa more than anything else I can.

5 varieties - Jersey Giant, Mortgage Lifter, Big Boy, Mater Sandwich, & Margherita

This is the 1st year to plant any potatoes.  We did both normal as well as sweet potatoes.  I decided to dig up part of them up today.  I dug up about 1/2 of the normal potatoes - they look so good and I will definitely be planting many many more next year so we have a lot to go in the basement cellar for tide us over thru the fall and into winter.  I dug up one of the 3 sweet potato hills - we planted 3 different varieties.  The one I dug up today is called Beauregard.  Holy cow were they big and lots of them!!  I created the hills with 1/2 dirt and 1/2 with bags of compost from Price Farms Organics - I had bought their bags of compost for the 1st time this Spring and I will definitely buy more!  I have the potatoes on an old window screen to cure.  The sweet potatoes will have to cure for a few weeks in warm temps,  the normal potatoes I was just wanting the dirt on them to dry off so I can clean them up before I take them inside.  I read not to wash your potatoes till you use them as getting them wet can lead to them getting moldy/rot.

So tonight we plan on cooking out on the grill.  I have 2 cobs of corn we didn't husk to grill, as well as peppers (we grill with feta cheese in them) and some of the fresh potatoes... making me hungry now!

Tomorrow I'm gonna work on picking all the soy/edamame beans as well as the pole green beans.  Hoping to get some room to till up an area to plant fall crops.  

Hope everyone is having a great weekend!  Enjoy this beautiful weather!!