We've got hot peppers! I guess you call this a success, though we have never really failed at growing those. They are beautiful as always, I look forward to making the first batch of hot sauce and this past year for the first time I have even used a few drops of it on select occasions! We continue to also foist it on anyone who comes over, uses it and expresses a liking for it! I was just about to make the first batch when friends (to be mentioned in the next post) came, liked the hot sauce and gladly took all I had picked off our hands! Happy them, happy me!
We have squash. Do we have "enough" squash? We are definitely not trying to leave squash in people's cars in a church parking lot. We have yet to feel "burdened" by it. But we normally have one or two when I want to use them in a recipe. We grew a type that is good for drying and I've done one round in the solar dryer. We have a beautiful one pictured here maturing for seed but that has more or less taken that plant out of commission, as it is busy getting this one matured! It seems once again our squash plants (especially the trombone) are giving us abundant flowers, some fruits and also aborting a good number. Part of it could be that we are trying to leave most of the trombone on the trellis to do their magic and become winter squash for us to enjoy for months to come. So we may be being a little too greedy, asking the plants to give us summer squash and winter squash in abundance. We are enjoying what we are harvesting - had summer gravy with fresh corn over some fried new potatoes and it was nothing to sneeze at!
Tomatoes, oh what to say about tomatoes. Let's start with what is doing great - the drying tomatoes and the sweet Noritas! We are getting LOTS of drying tomatoes and since we aren't getting a lot else yet we are eating them like cherry tomatoes, in large quantities! I haven't dried a single one. I harvest them, put them in a large bowl on the dining room table, and over the next two days until harvest time again the level goes down to nothing. We've also enjoyed a few platters of colorful slicers. I have yet to can a single tomato product. Most of what we have gotten to date has been very much seconds (what I can salvage from pecked ones or ones with blemishes), and they have made great shallot tomato sauces that we put on everything and anything, or eat plain. If you have never eaten cooked tomatoes with shallots and a little salt, you really must try it. It's an amazing combination that I can't believe I was only introduced to in the last year or two. I said the other day it should be a summertime staple the way cottage cheese has become a staple - always a pot or container of it from the fridge. So, lest my blood pressure rise too high, I will just briefly mention here that the chickens are doing a royal number on our cooking tomatoes and our slicers when they get into the main garden (a good feather clip on the troublemakers has hopefully solved the latter problem and the former won't be solved until we execute our wintertime "expand the main garden fence" project). They are ruthless, really. They go even for green tomatoes. Ok, I admit, that once again we have somewhat brought this on ourselves - Jason is feeding them less feed to encourage forage. And foraging they are, we were just hoping that they could forage somewhere else. So we'll see if I can replenish the tomato products in the root cellar. Some butchering has happened, some shuffling of chickens and some moving of coops has happened and will be happening to hopefully reduce the pressure on the cooking tomatoes so we can get a portion of the crop - in tomato form, rather than egg and meat form. 
To date we have never maxed out our capacity for fruit! We love it, the girls love it, much of what I harvest never seems to make it into the house. I have yet to bring a red or white raspberry in but hopefully that will change here as the season gets further along. I just put the first quart of blackberries in the freezer, but prior to that they joined the tomatoes on the table and slowly disappeared. The chickens like the berries too and will even eat them green, but I'm ok with that. There are so many fruits on and what they aren't getting the little fruit flies are waiting to descend upon. So it's a mixture of delicious blackberries and some soft ones, but we are getting enough to enjoy them and share some with the chickens and fruit flies. They are spread out in various places and that is probably my greatest challenge on harvest day - hitting all the gardens and keeping track of what I'm harvesting where (especially when I have one or two little ones in tow "helping" me). We just picked our first cantaloupe and it is sitting on the pass through making our mouths water. There is one lovely watermelon in the patch. It won't be a great melon year, but those tend to be "bonus foods" for us and we'll just savor the few we get to enjoy!
Gotta mention cucumbers yet - it's been a batch of pickles here and there, a supply good enough to keep us enjoying fresh cucumber dill salads when we get a hankering for one, and there's pretty much always a cucumber to grab and chomp on fresh. But I'd call it a mediocre cucumber year - we've got 4 nice seed ones just harvested so maybe getting those off a few vines will reinvigorate them and we'll get a few more nice flushes?! I have not canned nearly as many pickles as I did last year. It might just not be a "eat a quart of pickles for a snack anytime you want kiddos" kind of year. We'll have enough for the essentials - pizza nights and with pesto or egg salad sandwiches..
I feel pretty content with the beans in the freezer. I didn't do as many dilly beans this year BUT for the dilly beans (and pickles) that I did, we had enough dill. It's the first year that I can remember that I didn't reach out to our neighbor to beg some dill heads from her abundant patch. That is a success for sure! I decided to go light on dilly beans as we have some leftover and freeze more beans. We have one large shelf full in our standing up freezer. They won't last all winter by any means but will take us for awhile and I couldn't really fit more in anyway. Every other day we are still getting a nice mess of beans - though the bush beans are over, the yellows are getting so ridden with bean beetles they aren't worth much and the rattlesnake beans in the kitchen garden have yet to come into their own. It's mostly the purples that are still producing really well. I'll get out there to see what we find today as soon as Terah decides to get started with her day! We decided this year to not do successful plantings of bush beans and instead snuck in some buckwheat in the one row. So right now we are waiting for that the mature and the seed bean patch to be ready for harvest and then out come the beans/buckwheat and in go fall carrots!
I still think one of the most beautiful things in our summer garden are okra flowers. They are exquisite! Our little patch of okra is doing good and I'm adding a little handful of chopped okra to my quart bag in the freezer every other day. It never is a lot at one time, but over the course of the season we get a nice stack of quart bags that will provide us with a hearty supply for gumbo stew over the winter - another winner with the whole family! We haven't done any fried okra yet but that is just around the corner as Jason saved some "fryers" when butchering this past weekend and Kali's eggplant are looking good! So proud of her success in that realm!
Our pepper plants look better than they have in a number of years and are loaded with fruit. The ripening process for them (and the tomatoes) has been slow and I think that is in part due to a cooler summer we have had. I think it doesn't feel like August in part because we haven't been sweating buckets like we often do in August. Days in the 70's or maybe low 80's and often getting to 60 or below at night. I'm not apt to complain about that but the tomatoes would take hotter and likely the peppers would ripen faster. Let me be clear that I'm not sitting around twiddling my thumbs waiting for any of these things. Quite frankly, I sometimes even feel a moment of relief when I see a tomato mostly eaten on the ground (that's one I won't have to chop or can!). But that is fleeting as I really do love seeing the color move across the canning shelves and the pops of cans sealing will always be one of my favorite sounds. That said, I'm not sure how the peak of tomatoes and new student orientation are going to mix. Time will tell, and so far I've always survived August!It looks like I'm about to have two side kicks awake and ready to head out with buckets and bowls to see what we can find. Every other morning is harvest day so we'll go searching for all the things mentioned above. Today that will hopefully not be too long of a job because there is also pie crusts to get made for a birthday brunch tomorrow and ice cream custards to get chilling for a birthday party tonight! We are 3 days shy of having a 14 year old in the house and the celebrations are getting underway!
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