Bounty

I've been putting off posting on the garden, because I don't know where to start! So much work has gone into it this year, and so much bounty has come out, that I feel overwhelmed by the idea of summing it all up in one post. So I won't. I'll write a little now, and see how far that takes me.

I'm so very pleased with our progress this summer--every year we take a few steps forward. We haven't reached our ultimate goal yet, but that's okay--as long as we keep moving ahead, I'm happy. This winter my husband and I spent many contented hours working on a month-by-month garden plan, looking through books and catalogues, and making lists for each month. Of course we didn't follow it perfectly, and there were things that fell through the cracks, but it helped immensely and kept us from forgetting all the many things we wanted to get done.

It was not a good year for gardening. We never really had Spring, and then we never really had Summer. It just rained, and rained, and rained. But during the few moments that it wasn't raining, I was out in the garden--and that made all the difference. I stuck to my lists, and planted in the mud, and almost everything throve. We lost some broccoli plants to slugs and a fair number of potatoes and carrots to burrowing rodents, and we won't harvest many ripe tomatoes, but other than that, we produced a lot more vegetables than we could eat. I gave away bags and bags of romaine, onion scapes, and kale, and the crop of green beans almost had me in tears--every time I went out there were more to be picked and processed.

The bounty won't see us through the entire winter--around about January we'll have to buy vegetables from the grocery store again--but that's partly because we don't have the necessary storage for all of it. For now, it's wonderful to cook with fresh fruits and vegetables every day, knowing that they sprang from our earth with the help of our hands.

I wish I'd kept a more accurate tally of our bounty--maybe next year. At least we have a good idea of what will feed us through the summer and well into the winter, and next year we can take a few more steps towards self-sufficiency.