Ready or Not, Here We Go!

My first bean harvest was ready the other day, and I let mine get very dry on the vine, since I save them for soup...my two bush varieties were already done, though the two pole bean varieties are still flowering and just starting to make pods.  The two beans I picked were Tiger's Eye and  October beans I think.  I say I think, because I just realized I bought 4 beans with almost the exact same pattern and color, but they have slightly different degrees of shading.  This makes it extremely difficult to tell which beans are which when they aren't completely mature.  And now, after shelling some beans this evening, that explains why I kept finding a few beans that didn't neatly fit into either of the two groups I thought I'd picked.  I also planted Christmas Lima and Speckled Cranberry Beans.  Note to self:  Next year, plant beans that look COMPLETELY different or plant them in opposite ends of the garden. Unfortunately, most of the Christmas Limas got taken out due to a bacterial blight they got earlier in the summer... Thankfully, it didn't spread to the rest of the beans, but almost all the limas had to be ripped out.

It is now the time of year that I can't go out to the garden without coming back with at least 2 baskets of tomatoes plus other things.  The problem is that now that I've moved, I have a much cooler house, and an awesome yard of my own, but a MUCH SMALLER kitchen.  This presents a problem when you are trying to stack piles of tomatoes all over the place until you can do something with them. This is where I have decided to stack them for now, but my island will only hold so many.  These are the leftover tomatoes after I made tomato relish and pico de gallo today.

I also dug up the first row of carrots I planted this year.  Most of them are purple dragon carrots.  My carrots usually do really well, but this year, I had trouble with germination, and then they got crowded out by the potatoes and chard. 

I did, however, manage to get a few beautiful specimens.  I also got one rather large hybrid carrot that was part of a group of orange/yellow/white carrots.

My potato foliage is also looking pretty bad, so I took that as an indication that I should start digging some of them up.  You can see my potatoes are doing very well.  I borrowed my son's wagon to bring them back up to the house.  I planted 2 1/2 pounds of each:  La Ratte, All Blue, and Yukon Gold.  I am going to have a LOT of potatoes I think.  This was only 2-4 feet of each row.  I am pretty sure I will meet my goal of having enough potatoes to last through the winter.  I am going to go buy a laundry basket to put each variety into for storage.

Thursday was my first real tomato harvest.  This was Sunday, only 3 days later. You can see Brandywines, rainbow, romas, purple cherokee, white beauty, and some other kind that I am not sure of.  I thought I had two white beauty plants...but one was obviously mislabeled.  The tomatoes got huge like White Beauty does, but on one plant they turned a deep cherry red.  Hmmmm...oh well.  I will not look a big tomato in the mouth, so to speak.

For size comparison, you can see next to my hand, these are huge tomatoes.

Canning season, here we come.  Are your tomatoes coming in now?