Wednesday, August 06, 2008

summer bounty

carrot harvest harvest
tomato bowl russet potatoes
garlic harvest Aug 2
harvest squash give away

I am so lucky this year to have such good food, free for the harvest from my gardens! These are photos of some of my harvests from the past few days. My favorites are the beets, potatoes, carrots, beans and even the overabundant squash. Just one? - my real favorite this week is probably the Chiogga beets and tender greens.

The potatoes are also one of my favorites. Tonight I had dinner guests and before the meal, we headed over to the garden and dug in the potato patch. I didn't remember what I planted where, but I ended up finding 6 or 8 very good sized Russets. We popped them in the oven and ate them with butter. Soooo good!

Cheers to August! The best month of the year.

I read last night the chapter of Micheal Pollan's "In Defense Of Food" where he says that we (in the US) need to spend more time preparing our food and enjoying eating it. I took this to heart tonight and did my best. With our baked potatoes, we ate grilled local pork tenderloin, Lutz and Chiogga beets with greens, green beans, local bread, garden salad with orange, black and pink tomatoes, and blueberry pie. It is certainly is nice to take the time to grow, harvest, prepare and enjoy a meal with your family (and a martini!).

Cucurbita pepo (squash)

Daucus carota

potatoes (Solanum tuberosum)
harvests from my vegetable gardens

4 comments:

Andrea said...

What a wonderful harvest!

Chiot's Run said...

The tomatoes are really beautiful. It's so satisfying to grow some of your own food!

Anonymous said...

This is making my mouth water! What an impressive harvest for just a few days!

Lisa said...

I love the feeling of harvesting vegetables that I planted and planning dinner around them. I harvested so much garlic in June that I'll be using home-grown, too, for some time in daily cooking, along with fresh herbs -- I'm grateful for the abundance. And it hardly seems like work when it's so much fun to grow things. (Even with annoying tomato diseases and herbivores....). Michael Pollan is definitely on the right track. I'm trying to get inspired about preserving some of the harvest, too, but I think I'll need to get a small (energy-efficient) freezer!

Your photos of your harvest are lovely, too (as usual).