harvest!

Today was a super productive day of the best sort: harvest time! James and I capitalized on this afternoon's lovely fall weather to get our gardening on, resulting in several hours' worth of hacking our way through our planter boxes run amok.

One result was several humongous bowls full of tomatoes.



Even as I type this, I can smell them simmering down into what will hopefully be a delicious sauce. It certainly smells tasty:)

We also pulled up even more potatoes. Tonight, they were bound for potato-leek soup. It's the third time I've made it this year with potatoes from our garden, and it just keeps getting better! This time's new innovation was adding mustard seeds early on with the leeks, which makes it a little more poppy. Mmm:)

And it wouldn't be harvesting season without some preserves! We didn't grow these cucumbers, but James sure turned them into pickles!:)



All in all, it's been good times in our garden this year. Next year, I think we'll try to grow our tomatoes in separate containers to keep them from taking over our entire planter boxes (and hopefully to keep them from splitting open in the rain the way they all did this year). And maybe we'll grow more beets again, since those did well for us this year. We'll definitely do potatoes again, and garlic. If we get chard even half as good next year as ours was this year, I'll be psyched. We even had some mild success with peppers--maybe better next year if we keep the aforementioned tomatoes from running wild over them. It's a process, but we may, slowly, be getting better at it.