I’m doing two posts tonight, that’s right.  This first one is my summary, mostly in pictures, of what we’ve been up to lately.  Harvest season has really begun and we’re up to our eyeballs in green beans and up to our, well, ankles in raspberries (they only just started).  No complaints, really.  Anyway after this I have a great recipe I’d like to share, but I’ll do that as a separate post so I can, like, keep my recipe posts pure or something.

So far no preserving of raspberries has been necessary.  Having a hard time keeping the kids out of the raspberry hedge.  They each had several timeouts tonight for picking underripe berries.

Another day, another basket o’ beans.

I blanched them for a couple minutes (Adam said “you nimrod 90 seconds is more than enough” but I like them a little softer).  I was able to freeze 2 quart size bags, bringing my grand total of bean preservation to 3 quarts.  Plus we’ve eaten some too.

Adam ripped out all of our bolted lettuce today.  We’re trying to find the energy to plant something else there; most likely some kale.  Not anymore tonight though.

He also stripped off the leaves from the bottom 5-6 inches of each brussel sprout stalk.  The teeny tiny buds have appeared and apparently stripping off the leaves will help the plant put its energy into those buds now.  We’ll see.  (This is what one of our gardening books said to do.)

FINALLY.  We have tomatoes.  Over the past few weeks I’ve watched the plants getting bigger and bigger (they’re about 5 ft tall now) and they had so few blossoms.  This week they finally started setting fruit.  Going to be a couple more weeks but at least I know that it will happen now.  We can probably make fried green tomatoes one of these days too.

Here’s the whole garden.  Shoot, this was almost a week ago now.  See how behind I am?  The zucchini have thankfully stopped getting bigger and now are setting to fruit.  We will be giving away zucchini soon, I fear.  Those things are massive.

Finally, I used a box of old slate tiles from an old project in our old house to make some little paths through the strawberries and asparagus, and to the rain barrel (we used to have the time and money to do things like remodel our bathroom with slate tile, imagine that).  I didn’t do a super fantastic bang-up job and there might be some re-positioning of tiles every spring, but it works for me!

So yeah, we’re keeping busy.