Garden Bounty

We're now officially at that point of the summer when it's a struggle to keep up with the food coming out of the garden. Here's a basket full of food that I harvested a few days ago. That's a head of Savoy cabbage dominating the basket. Tucked in front of it are a few leaves of white cabbage, and strewn among its leaves are a handful of Peacevine cherry tomatoes. There's a zucchini waving hello from the back, and plenty of purple basil on the side.

I've been making batches of pesto from our green and purple basil varieties, as well as from our overgrown sage bushes, every few days. It all grows so fast! There's a batch of chard out there just waiting for me to find the time to pick, wash, blanch, chop and freeze it. I'm still waiting on supplies for my pressure canners to arrive, but when they do, it's borshch time. We're still waiting for the beefsteak tomatoes to really start producing. There are tons of large fruits out there. But they are agonizingly slow to ripen. When that happens, I'll be making a super-easy roasted tomato sauce with however many tomatoes we can't eat au naturel. Absolutely nothing, by the way, beats an open-faced sandwich of perfectly ripe Brandywine tomato and purple basil with mayonnaise on toasted homemade, no knead bread. There are a few golden weeks each year when this is all I want to eat. I get heartburn and canker sores from all the acidity, but I don't care. Fresh tomatoes are a seasonal crop; I don't bother buying or eating them outside of those few precious summer weeks.

Soon the melons will ripen, the potatoes will need digging and the beans will need shelling. In the fall we'll have leeks, celeriac, and still plenty of kale and some cabbage. I hope to have parsnips too. The arugula sylvetta, in its wide open coldframe, is just getting around to reseeding itself now, which thrills me because it means we'll have some delicious greens (my favorite kind for sandwiches and pizza) through much of the fall and winter.