Wow! We have been SO busy with the garden on our little homestead. This year we managed to implement many new things we have been wanting to do for a long time. A lot has happened in the past two months and I will try to catch up.
So far this year has been very dry. Hardly any rain. Our new raised beds are working very well and producing heavily. As I write this Carolyn is processing a few 5-7lb heads (weight before processing – 3 white) of cabbage into sauerkraut from the raised beds. Bonus- the chickens really love eating the cabbage leaf scraps, raw or boiled.
Our lettuce produced for a really long time. It finally bolted around the 4th of July and our replacement lettuce wasn’t ready yet. Its just about ready now. Our farm cat Bebe has been very, um… efficient… at taking care of the rabbits that dared to sample the lettuce 😉
We have been eating a lot of eggplant and zucchini- eggplant & zucchini fritters, zucchini muffins etc. We have regular eggplant and fingerling eggplant.
We have also had a fantastic crop of pickling cucumbers! We have made nearly 50lbs of pickles so far and they are still coming! Huge difference from last year before the raised beds and all the rain we had. We probably canned about half of them, or more.
We also harvested a few peppers. With such little rain, all of our plants have been stunted in height, despite my regular nightly 2 hour waterings. To help the plants out, we took all the fruit from the bell pepper plants ( 9 pounds) and roasted them and made a really sweet pasta meat sauce. We also side dressed with Carolyn’s home made organic fertilizer 5 10 10. 
We also harvested our garlic, just yesterday. We learned (too late) that we have been harvesting it too late, after ALL of the green has died back.
We should be harvesting when only 2 or 3 leaves die back. Each leaf corresponds to a paper layer over the garlic bulb that helps to protect it for long storage. That explains why our garlic has such thin skin. Next year! On a brighter note, the garlic was still the best looking and largest we have ever grown in all the years we have grown it. I believe it mostly attributable to careful soil prep- LOTS of organic material and tilling. We harvested about 300 head.
(Blocks made by Grandpa Cocchiarale, 1972)
The tomatoes are doing well, but they are also stubby this year. Just today we started seeing some turning ripe. More on them as they start coming in.