Our garden is full of food. The peas are ending, but the purple beans are still going strong. The cucumbers are just beginning to produce, too, and we have spotted tiny gumball-sized pumpkins on the long pumpkin runners. The pinto beans (in the last picture) are beginning to show their speckles! Today we harvested several pounds of purple beans, four lemon cucumbers, three regular cucumbers, a zucchini, and the one and only mystery gourd.
I almost wrote, "It's like having our own farmer's market!" but that is ridiculous. How funny that we compare garden-grown veggies to the ones on the supermarket when it should be the other way around, and how the canvas bag of produce I just harvested reminds me of the farmer's market, not the farm.
This weekend we walked around the property surrounding the house, to explore what is left of the old farm's orchard. It turns out there are pears, several types of apples, and red prunes! There is so much free fruit around here! Maybe even too much... we'll probably be shoveling rotting fallen fruit in a couple of weeks so it doesn't attract bees.
For the past few days, we've been making fruit salads using increasingly more fruit from the property. We trek down to the little pond, which is surrounded by blackberry plants, and pick a couple of handfuls of the delicious little hard-to-store berries, just enough to add to the day's fruit salad. And today we were able to use our own pears too!
This is summer at its best. I love the warm leisurely feel of August, and that we can literally step out our door and pick a gorgeous, perfectly ripe, organic fruit or vegetable any time we want.
