harvesting!

It's that time of year where the bounty of the garden begins to really roll in.

Last evening we had a thunderstorm,

along with a wall cloud hovering over neighborhood 

that just a few miles southeast produced a tornado.

No one was injured, thank goodness.

This has been quite the season for storms.

Last week we had storms that produced up to 80 mph. winds.

Our garden really felt those gusts.

We woke up to flattened corn stalks and disheveled tomato plants.

Jesse propped the stalks back up and it turns out only a few were broken.

The tomato plants we staked again,

and only a few branches were in need of trimming.

We've been thankful for the rain,

still no hand watering the garden,

but the severity of these storms can cease!

We weren't home during the potential tornado last night,

but viewing the radar from another city.

Being from the Midwest I've always found

the sound of thunder actually comforting; 

high winds, though, are not friendly sound.

So all this rain is producing amazing goodness from the garden, at least.

We've begun to harvest pole beans, bush beans, Dragon's Egg cucumbers,

Boston Pickling cucumbers, four types of squash

and all of our Purple Viking potatoes

(the picture below is just one fourth of our potato harvest).

I'm very please with this potato variety.

We've eaten it fried, 

but mostly baked in the crock pot.

I'd describe their taste as mostly creamy.

Like I've mentioned in the past,

the lack of starch in a homegrown potato is astonishing.

I could eat these potatoes every day,

but will try to stretch them for our meals over two months.

Since it rained last evening we knew it would be easy to pull weeds

so that is what Jesse and I did this morning after breakfast

because the garden was in need of that care.