Vegetable Garden Mania 2016

August is crazy full of homegrown vegetables! Thanks to the drought this year, our tomatoes are more abundant than we've ever experienced. I find it funny to say those two realities in the same sentence, but our tomato plants are giving us more food than we can keep up with. We've canned, frozen, dehydrated, eaten fresh and keep on, keepin' on. It's so cool to grow so much healthy food, without chemicals in this patch of soil out our door. How lucky we are! Other than growing the plants from seeds and putting them in the ground with a cage around them, we did nothing to encourage this harvest. Sometimes the stars align and everything just hums with the rightness of it all.

Just like this, though really this podcast highlights a most magical (truly, truly magical) piece of our forest recently discovered.

We are also bringing in our storage onions...

and garlic...

and dried beans. How we love dried beans!

Steve shelled most of these beans in the sweltering sun because we wanted these babies to dry out. This past week we got about 2 inches of much needed rain and the humidity stayed high. We were thrilled for our plants, but realized our beans thought it was time to sprout in their pods so we harvested immediately. The pods stayed so damp, even after a few days on the drying racks and more beans sprouted so Steve handled it. Just like that. He is a boy of action for which I am forever grateful.

Heirloom dry beans are so beautiful I think they could be worn as jewelry or act as money in a bartering system...beauty and nutrition all wrapped up into one sweet little bean. We want to grow many more beans next year. Always more! Pictured are King of the Early and Calypso or Yin Yang, you can guess which is which.

This time of year is often overwhelming for us in many ways because incredible vegetable abundance often leads to a feeling of not enough time in the day - so in addition to working our little bums off, we savor each spectacular blooming flower, singing insect (we love you Coneheads!), Monarch fluttering by, flock of singing and feasting American Goldfinches and drink deeply from the well of summer goodness. What else is there to do?