Harvest time

I've been ignoring my garden for the last two weeks, and look what came up

I figured it was time to pull things up and make room for the new lettuce and cucumbers I'm planting for the fall, but some plants are just not ready to give up despite the heat. We have a bunch of beans, a couple tomatoes (those plants are giving up) and a bunch of green peppers and jalapenos (there was more you just can't see them in the picture). We already have lettuce coming up, so we'll keep watching our little patch.

We also supplemented the pears from the lake house with pears from our two little trees on the side of the house, and then we canned them all. We went from this:

to 6 jars canned.

It won't last long and they should have been packed more firmly, but it was fun to do with T-Rex. It really wasn't too difficult, so I may buy more from the farmer's market and do it again - maybe catch some end of season peaches too. Next spring we need two more garden plots somewhere in the yard. It was a lot of fun for the girls (and actually their friends too) to see where food comes from and to see that yes, people actually put a lot of work into what we eat. I'm not a person that has to be able to feed my family for a year off of my little garden (although I do enjoy reading about those people), but all of us learned that the food tastes better when it is grown naturally instead of some commercial grower. Now if only our farmer's market was totally local.......