Pictures speak more than many words on this front! The garden fence worked well this year. The soil's fertility improves a bit each year. And we plant more plants. And our peach tree gave us a few peaches for the first time! All that equals more food!! A very exciting and exhausting task to figure out what to do with it in the time available before it spoils. And we have also benefited from the over abundance of crops we don't grow (yet) from others' gardens. We were thrilled this year to find ourselves in a similar position to be able to give away some of the fruits of our labors. From this season's efforts, our pantry (not to mention our bedroom closet) is now bursting with applesauce, salsa, green beans, chicken, diced tomatoes, tomato juice, peach jam, canned peaches and pears, tomato sauce, pickles, apple butter, and other jams. Our freezer continues to be rearranged to fit in a few more containers of various thing around the corn, pesto, diced peppers, okra, lamb's quarters and more lamb's quarter, jams, tomato paste, chicken, etc... Our supply of onions, garlic and potatoes is dwindling but will hold out for awhile yet, and the sweet potatoes are yet to be dug and the butternut will be with us for quite some time!! Oh, and the chestnut trees seem to have a bumper crop and the persimmons are already ripening. I said recently that at times (on the food front anyway), I have a sense of being "overwhelmed by abundance." And I struggle to think that there are persons living close to me that do not have enough food to eat. Somehow it seems we need to find ways to connect the dots - we turned down multiple offers of extra produce this year. For a future year, when my energy outlasts the canner, I hope to work more intentionally at getting surplus food where it can be used by persons would would most benefit from it.Here's some more visuals. Many times this year we have gotten to the end of a project before we realize that photos might have been nice:
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