Strangish Harvests

Was this a strange garden year for you? It was for us. Really strange.

My snap dragons were piddly, my cucumber plants only grew 2 inches tall, and the lettuce bed wilted after just a few weeks. Weird. 

On the other hand, the Peas did fantastic again, the Cosmos have bloomed better than ever, and we have the hugest Pumpkin we've ever grown slowly oranging (not a word) out there in the dirt as we speak!

If I were a real gardener (as opposed to a pretend one) then I could tell you the reasons for this weird year. Some day. You stick around long enough and I'll have all this life stuff figured out. 

Pete experienced the same thing in his garden. He and I spent many an afternoon staring at his normally prolific plants, scratching our heads and saying intelligent things like "huh. weird." 

Nonetheless, the peach trees produced again. And although it was only a smidgen of what they gave us last year, the little fuzzy morsels were juicy and delicious and we're grateful!

Did you know that kids pick best in their jammies?

Pretending that's true.

Not only did the trees produce less fruit, but they attracted many more birds than usual. Most (yes, sadly most) of the fruit was already half eaten.

Maybe we waited too long to pick. The birds wait until they're perfectly ripe, so if we had picked them a little green we may have saved a lot more. Next year!

This is about half of what we got. I'm serious you guys! We canned 58 quarts of slices, 3 batches of jam, and 7 one-gallon bags of frozen chunks for smoothies last year alone! And Pete put up more than we did!

Must be global warming:)

Is this sanitary? You have to get the fuzz off some how, right?
Any who. They were still delicious. I promise I wasn't writing here to complain today, because I'm actually totally tickled with what we did get! They were absolutely delicious. Anything homegrown is going to have SO much more flavor than what you pick up in the produce section at Smith's, that's just a given.

And aren't they pretty? We didn't can any (cause, you know, why?) we just ate them. And smiled a lot.