Harvest Galore!

The season has arrived! It seems like the fruit from our garden gradually increases a little at a time until suddenly, boom! We have an overabundant supply of fresh garden goodness! It can be tricky that this season arrives at the same time that we are supposed to start school, but I consider harvest, canning, and processing our food definitely a part of school! Living in Idaho, potato harvest is a big deal and there is actually an entire week when kids take school off and other's have work off just for harvesting the potatoes.

The first thing we picked was our watermelon. We planted 38 plants and harvested close to 100 melons! We usually like to pick our melons a few at a time and space them out over a few weeks, but we had a hard frost in the forecast so we were forced to pick everything. The kids had a pretty successful roadside sale

Where do you store 80 watermelons before selling them?

Next on the list was our corn. I love doing corn because the kids get so excited to help and they can actually help!

We ended up with around 10 dozen ears of corn which was plenty for our freezing purposes.

The next thing on the agenda was fruit. We have to order our peaches and pears because they don't like to grow here in tandem with our crazy, unpredictable weather. We were able to pick some apples from a friend's orchard (our orchard isn't quite big enough yet) and of course, all the fruit was ready at the same time. Time for a canning marathon!

Peaches and pears with the cousins!

112 quarts of applescauce!

It was a marathon, but it is so much fun when you get to do it with cousins, grandparents and uncles and aunts. The other thing that makes it awesome is doing it all outside in the beautiful fall weather. You can clean up the super sticky mess with just a hose!

Last but not least...pumpkins!

We ended up with a good amount of orange carving pumpkins and flat white cinderella pumpkins. We also have a good variety of mini pumpkins to decorate with indoors.

I haven't forgotten our tomatoes. They are so slow in ripening but we haven't lost faith. We plan on getting a good enough harvest before the snow flies!

It has been a good year and we are simply counting our blessings! Happy Fall!