Harvest Weekend!

It turned out to be quite the harvest weekend this weekend!

Boy, does this time of year ever just tear me in two. The blogs I seem to follow are written by overbearing optimists who savour every bit of every season and love every minute of life. At least that's what it seems like to me. Here at Silver Sisters it's ok to not anticipate the coldness of winter with bated breath. Who are we kidding - it's not "crisp" and "fresh" it's darn cold and dark and I'm just not looking forward to it, no matter how much you use pretty words to describe it. (But I'll still read those blogs, who am I kidding.)

All right, back on track, this season is heart wrenching because it's getting colder and darker and it's only going to get worse. But on the flip side, the summer's going through it's great crescendo of growth. I'm taking fruits and vegetables, my friends. All that work you've put into your garden this summer is finally paying off, and the farmers' markets are FULL. This weekend was the final climax of that - the last farmers' market of the year. In celebration (and sadness) I took out a whole bunch of cash, knowing full well that I always spend every dime I come with.

Here's the haul:

And it was a haul, you'll notice. Not everything fit into the wagon so I ended up pulling a wagon plus carrying two bags of produce. The box is full of tomatoes which I made roasted tomato sauce for the freezer. Imagine in February savouring those September tomatoes. There are also 2 big bags of peppers which I chopped up, froze on cookie sheets and then put into bags. I just love having peppers frozen to pop into recipes in the winter when they cost far too much for watery produce from another continent. The green foliage you see are beet tops, goldens for my family and reds that I picked up for a friend. I also splurged on some honeycomb that I've been eyeing since the spring. I've always wanted to try it but it's expensive so I've been putting it off. For the record, I'm glad to have tried it just once, but it's just honey and wax - I don't quite get it. And the icing on the cake - fresh local strawberries!! I was so excited to see these - it's been a rough year for strawberries and I thought I'd totally missed the season. Boy, store bought berries have nothing on these babies!

And we're not done yet! On Sunday we ventured forth to harvest our potatoes. Friends of ours generously agreed to lend us some garden space this summer. We eat a mountain of potatoes each year so I thought they'd be a good thing to grow. Plus potatoes are easy, and require little care so success is almost guaranteed.

Here is a view of our garden as we are harvesting. My stuff is in the forground. bare earth and dead potato tops.

Our friends generously added in a couple of extra vegetables that they had more than enough of - romaine lettuce, kohlrabi, coriander and kale. The potato yield was very low this year as it was quite dry at the farm, however, I was still happy to see how many boxes of potatoes we ended up with. We'll be eating well this winter. At least for a couple of months.

When I say "we" I use that term loosely. "We harvested" means I dug up potatoes and kids yelled "Potato" as loud as they could and scrambled to grab the miraculously appearing spuds from the dirt. It was great fun. For the first row. until interest waned. Then I dug potatoes and the almost 2 year old yelled "tados" and grabbed what she could. Still quite fun, but it really is exhausting work to to all day when you're used to sitting in front of a computer instead. I'm not sure we'll have a garden out there again as we weren't able to give it the attention it deserved and I really felt bad when the weeds cast their seeds on everyone else's soil.

Here's a picture at the end of the day of my little helper. You know, she stayed out there for the whole day picking up potatoes and throwing them in the boxes. Amazing, really, that it caught her attention for that long. The rest is well-deserved.

p.s. Anyone want some mint? As usual, I've got more than enough to feed to mum in tea this winter.

p.p.s I'm also looking for recipies for things to do with mint... any ideas?

p.p.p.s. I'd give you a mint plant, too, if anyone's interested.... for free and you don't even have to tweet about it.