Harvest Monday

I am a little late getting my Harvest Monday post up today, because it's been a day of catching up with vegetable preserving chores. This past week we had visits from our niece and her husband, who live in Oregon, and our younger son who lives in New York. It has been wonderful to be with family, since we are all so far-flung, but I have been barely able to keep up with harvesting, let alone preserving. Today I am busy canning tomatoes and sauerkraut and blanching and freezing beans. I think I'll be at it into the night!
Don't have too many pictures either, but the harvest has been terrific. I am inundated with beans this year, to the point where I've been giving them away by the bagful just to avoid dealing with them all. They kicked in late, but boy, when they did they really went to town!

 The photo above is what I picked today and it totaled over 19 pounds of produce. It is representative of what I've been picking all week. My zucchini plants are all but dead, and my yellow squash is going fast, but it is putting out a last little flush of squashes. The trombocino is still going strong.
The cucumbers are slowing down, but I am still getting plenty for refrigerator pickles. I harvested green beans, more yellow Gold Marie Vining beans and Chinese Red Noodle beans.  I also harvested some of my very first dried beans, but I will post some photos of those on another day. Broccoli side shoots are still producing. Tomatoes are coming in fast and furiously and I now feel pretty confident that I'll be able to can enough stewed tomatoes to get us through the year before the vines are completely dead and the tomatoes stop ripening.

I pulled two of my larger leeks to see how they are doing and was pretty happy with them, but I'll let the rest try to get a bit larger before I take any more. We look forward to potato leek soup when the weather gets cool.
My August harvest total was 291 and a half pounds compared to 203 pounds last summer. Which is awesome! One good thing about having my son here was that I was able to send him home with the equivalent of a nice CSA box. He left here with a cabbage, a large bag of beans, a bag of cherry tomatoes, a trombocino, some heads of garlic, a container of refrigerator pickles, a container of homemade sauerkraut, homemade yogurt, jam, jelly, pickle relish and honey from his uncle's hives. He groused a little about having to carry it all through the streets of NY, but once he got it home to Brooklyn I'm sure he was happy to have it! Now if only I could get some of that good stuff to the son in Florida!
Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne's Dandelions each Monday where you can enjoy the harvest reports from vegetable gardeners everywhere. That's where I'm headed now!