Ah, so this is what it was all about! Finally the garden is giving up that abundance that was promised: beans of all kinds, potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes and tomatoes, and our first eggplant (apple green). There’s enough to eat and put by.
This is one day’s harvest. The tomatoes that weren’t eaten straight away were canned in a tomato-apple chutney:
In the back are peaches (like the apple, also farmers market) in syrup. Yes, that’s my fifties kitchen cabinetry: I love it!
And Amie loves to shell the red kidney and cannellini beans. We harvest the pods when they’re dry, light brown and leathery, and when you shake them the beans rattle inside. I don’t think I’ll have enough for eating (even one big meal), but there will be enough as seed for a much bigger planting next year. I don’t trust my drying methods – no barn or garage for drying the plants – so I freeze them. I hope they stay viable that way.
Tomorrow morning I’m going to harvest and process most of the basil plants. I think I might just chop them up in the food processor and freeze them in cubes, like the Omelays. I’m also going to do a backlog of laundry, as the rest of the day will be sunny. But this afternoon I still hope to put the Fall planting seedlings in.