The bad: The corn was ravaged by squirrels. The cucumbers gave us a couple of good weeks of production before dying a mysterious death. Rabbits (we think) ate the broccoli, though it may still give us a little something. And the wildlife ate 5 of our 10 tomato plants at the seedling stage. I still don't seem able to grow onions. The potatoes were almost a total bust (worse than last year, even). And the carrots are strangely stunted and have bad spots (huh? this has never happened to us before).
The good: Beans! The green beans were awesome again. The black beans rock my world. Fresh lettuce from the garden is the best thing ever. The basil went bonkers. We have four good-sized pumpkins growing! And we're getting a pretty decent crop of tomatoes from our surviving plants.
To hold on to some of the tomatoey goodness, I oven roasted them and put them away in the freezer to use for pasta sauce some dreary winter day. I used the method in The Homemade Pantry. It was easy and smelled good, but I won't be able to report on the tasty (I hope!) results for a few months.
Remarkably, even though the "bad" list looks longer than the "good" list, it still feels like victory. We grew some food; we got to eat it; it was yummy. I mean, can you honestly look at those roasted tomatoes and tell me it's not a win?
2 comments:
Definitely a multi level win with the tomatoes. I imagine Adelaide is adoring the pumpkins.
The Homemade Pantry looks like a great book. I am putting it on my list.
Adelaide adores everything in the garden...as long as we don't try to make her actually eat it! :)
The Homemade Pantry: I just got it recently, so I haven't had the opportunity to make much out of it yet. But everything in it looks great, and doable. Plus she wrote an intro page for every recipe that is more of a personal story, so it's just a great read (I actually took it to read on the train for a couple of days, and cookbooks are not my usual commuter reading material!).
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