A Bountiful Harvest Indeed

We are in the final week of our garden this season, and we have had so much fun. We've been able to watch the garden grow and produce so many wonderful things in just a little over five months. Plants are amazing, and we have loved growing a garden. We hope to be able to grow one again next year and have already begun talking about what we want to plant.

Last week the weather turned cold, so we went and harvested almost everything. We'll be finishing up the last of it this weekend. Here are some of the items we harvested:

Look at all our wonderful tomatoes. Some of them were red and ripe, but since it was so cold and the garden was no longer being watered, we decided to pick them. We'll see if there are any more left (or that have since grown) when we go back out for the final time this weekend, but this is quite an impressive haul. We counted them all and there was a total of 450 tomatoes!! They are all different sizes, but James' mom is letting them ripen at her house and will be canning them into spaghetti sauce. Thank you, mom!! :) You can also see some of our watermelons in the picture, too. They weren't fully developed, but still so cute. I'm impressed they grew so well since we planted them later. Next year we'll plant them earlier.

These are the pumpkins and the sunflowers we were able to harvest. There were eight pumpkins total (nine counting the one we picked a couple of weeks ago that is currently sitting amongst our Halloween decorations). James is so excited about these. He can hardly wait to carve them and I can hardly wait to make them into pumpkin pies. We'll see how well they turn out. I'll be sure to let you know. Also, the sunflowers did so amazingly well that I feel like a proud parent! They not only survived some of the toughest conditions I have seen, but thy thrived! And just when we thought they were done, we find hundreds upon hundreds of seeds in them that we get to pick and roast. We need to let them dry out a bit more, but we've already taken the seeds out of two of them and we have a big wooden bowl half way full. We till have seven more sunflower heads to harvest seeds from. I'll be sure to post pictures once we have them all done.

The two pumpkins sitting in the grey planter are the from actual Jack-O-Lantern plant we planted. The rest of the ones on the deck are from the Triple Treat plant that we will be able to use for pies, to eat the seeds, and to carve for Halloween as well. It's so fun to look out on our balcony and see these vegetables sitting there, waiting for us to do something with them. It makes us happy.

Well, that's all for now. Like I said, we'll be making our final trip to the garden on Saturday to harvest the few remaining items (like the horse radish) and then that will be it until next year. I wonder what the garden will look like this weekend.