harvesting and eating

Today's harvest started in the back yard. I got tomatoes (big and li'l), many ground cherries, a couple of carrots, a scallion, the lettuce I'd let go to seed so I can replant the seeds this autumn....

and after I ate a carrot with lunch (a lunch that also included salsa), I went out front and found my first Ping Tung eggplant was big enough to harvest, so now I had this plus tomatoes for supper:

It took me a minute of staring at this, casting about in my memory for recipes, to remember that I had mozzarella cheese in the fridge, so I'll be making eggplant parmesan with home-made sauce (I'll grate half of the carrot into the sauce, which will make it sweeter, and I'll roast the sauce rather than cooking it on the stovetop, for more sweetneess). I have Italian sausage that's going in around the fried eggplant when I bake it. It's going to be so darned good!  My mouth is already watering.

The Dwarf Purple Heart tomatoes from the Dwarf Tomato project continue to be winners of my tomato variety trials. One double-bloomed tomato was 1.4 pounds, and if you think about that occurring on a dwarf plant, that's even more impressive!

Like 75% of my big tomatoes now, these are going straight into the freezer when picked ripe, that is, after I core them and pop them into zipper bags. When I have 10 pounds or more in the freezer, I'll do some canning. About half my cherry tomatoes are being dehydrated for eating this winter as snacks or in soups.


The spaghetti squash plant is setting squash like wild right now. Every day I walk out there and see another one. All other squashes--and the cucumbers--are still at flowering stage, but there are butterflies, bees, pollinating flies out there all day long. Soon I'm going to be eating cucumber salads, cucumbers dipped in whipped cream cheese, and pickling some as well. (Garlic dills and bread and butter pickles, both.)

I can see how August and September will be quite busy with "putting up" food. I know it's a lot of work, but it's fun, and there's something special about pulling down a jar of something you grew yourself from seed, nurtured, harvested, preserved, and having a taste of summer's bounty on a cold weeknight in January. Nature is good, isn't She?