Garden, part 2

All summer long, and most of the fall, i enjoyed digging through the garden to see what was ready to harvest.  The upkeep was pretty minimal.  I did sprinkle some organic ready made fertilizer pellets on it twice, but used significantly less than the package said to use.  I didn't have to weed, at all really.

I could/should have separated the carrots better, but they grew together and were still edible. 

Everything grew taller and leafier than I'd imagined.  The tomatoes and tomatillos took over and were over 5 feet tall in spots.  I wound the watermelon vine up and through the chain link fence and it grew until it ran out of fence.  The single plant produced about 8 delicious melons.  

Certain things didn't work as well-  the bok choi rocketed right away-- it was too hot for them.  Some greens i planted in pots did the same.  The zucchini ended up dying of some kind of mildewy fungus- it was definitely too crowded anyway.  The potatoes in the burlap didn't get watered enough.  

I also weighed and recorded everything that I harvested.  But, it doesn't account for the produce that grew on the neighbor's side of the fence, or the things I gave away off the vine, or all the tomatoes Rufus enjoyed.  

We grew 208 lbs of fresh produce, and an additional 10 lbs of green tomatoes were picked.  

For several weeks in a row, every day's harvest looked something like this.  Some of the harvest was used for fresh cooking, but much of it was canned into salsa, or frozen in various preparations.

Also, the day after the first frost, I picked the rest of the tomatoes, and did not weigh them, but it was enough to fill the bottoms of a few cardboard beer case boxes and a dozen grocery bags of underripe tomatoes.  

I force ripened them in the basement over about a month.  We were eating fresh gorgeous tomatoes well into October.  The rest, I oven roasted and froze.