8/09: Harvest

Here's what we picked today: roma tomatoes, yellow pear tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, another pickle-cucumber, 2 thai pink tomatoes, and 4 purple tomatoes that we think are razzle dazzle (I cut one open so you could see the inside). Weslee picked all of these plus the beans. I'm thinkin now the beans might be black turtle beans instead of soy beans just because some of them are starting (on the bush) to turn purple, including the bean inside. I said it before and I'll say it again: patience!

We still haven't had any more rain since that downpour a few days ago, so today we got out there with the hose and did our duty. We plan to get into the corn beds tomorrow and get rid of the weeds, plus untangle the green beans from the corn. Several of our corn plants are showing silks so we think they are actually producing ears of corn! Of course, it would be nice if we knew what we were doing, but as we keep telling ourselves, this is our experiment year.

Our black-seeded simpson lettuce bolted a few days ago, so we'll be cleaning out those "beds" tomorrow too. Next week we're gonna start the seeds for spinach, buttercrunch and iceberg lettuce, and maybe some carrots (fall harvest).

We finally have enough cherry and roma tomatoes to dehydrate so I'm also going to be slicing those tomorrow or Monday and putting them in the dehydrator. Plus we're working on the websites feverishly to get them up and running next week: ( http://www.backyardgrocery.net/ and http://www.kidwhispers.net/ )

Today we made our once-in-3-months trip to Vitamin Cottage to stock up on supplements, nuts and seeds, and while we were there, noticed a home-school supply store in the next shopping center. Came away from there and Best Buy with lots of good workbooks and software for Weslee's coming school year. Vikki