Harvest Begins

It's finally time to start harvesting the veggies - for real.  We've had a few fruits of our labor here and there since the peas finished up in June, but mostly it's been loads of herbs, a few peppers, a couple of string beans and the lettuce.

Now the veggies are starting to come in - and just in time too!  Most of my friends are having a hard time fighting blight in their vegetable gardens.  Their carefully tended tomatoes are full of unripened and dying fruit.  Too late for them to save them.

We were fortunate.  I had a head's up from one of our farmer friends that the blight was starting to take off - so we stopped watering.  We could have gone with some chemical powder on the plants, but my DH and I have worked really hard to ensure that the vegetable garden (and the surrounding yard and garden beds) are free of pesticides and any chemicals that could possibly build-up in the soil, transferring into our vegetables.

It means more weeding, hauling loads of organic compost in the pickup (instead of those cute little easy to carry bags), and keeping close track of what we plant where so we can keep the crops rotating around in the beds to keep the nutritional minerals in the soil balanced.

But for all of that work, we get a nice little harvest of veggies that I know are nutritious.

So totally worth it.