Harvest

We have more tomatoes than you can poke a stick at. (I tried to poke a stick at them and I just couldn't.) The funny thing is, we didn't even put forth much of an effort this year. Planting time coincided with having a newborn, and so we almost didn't even have a garden. My aunt bought a whole bunch of sprouts from a local school for kids with special needs. (At this school, the kids plant the seeds, and cultivate the plants until they are ready to sell to the public. Cool, huh?) She had so many that she shared her abundance with us. Grant had tilled the garden earlier this year with a bag of peet moss and a bag of manure, so we plopped our plants in the ground and that was that. No rhyme or reason to it, and we just hoped for the best. We didn't fertilize, we didn't spray for bugs, we barely remembered to water.... and yet somehow our tomatoes did just as wonderfully as they did last year, if not better. We have picked literally hundreds of tomatoes so far. We also go a decent crop of peppers, squash, and a few zucchini (which is still plenty, if you ask me.) Our cantaloupe, which did awesome last year, have failed us this year. Darn.

We have become pros at canning. We have made LOTS of salsa and spaghetti sauce. I am glad we could this year. We had to give all of our tomatoes away last year because I was newly pregnant and I had a major aversion to tomatoes. I couldn't even be in the same room with a tomato. Just reading the word salsa would make me gag!

During such hard times with rising prices and a crummy economy, we are so grateful to have our garden and our home canned goods to helps us get by.