Potato Harvest

I was dreading a trip to our community plot this past week as we have abandoned it for 3 weeks with just a quick visit by Ben after abandoning it for the 3 weeks before that. Suprisingly it was planted well and everything just filled in it's own space and the potatoes were ready for digging.

And what a haul it was. Ben dug into the first row and potatoes seemed to cascade out of the earth. Asher was thrilled to find them in the ground and River following Asher's lead (as always these days!) he joined right in.

They also picked up their own activity. Washing the potatoes and getting them ready for market.

Over 60 lbs! Both varieties are good keepers, French Fingerlings and Corrolla.

Blackberries

Thankfully being on vacation didn't prevent us from enjoying some of this harvest. We are rolling in blackberries.

All I have to say is these canes have some major thorns. I brushed up against one, dropped my typical explitive and Asher told me to stand still so that he could pull the thorns out of my leg (yes they are big enough for a 3 year old to get them out). Regardless, they are delicious especially the ones that have swollen juice beads warm from the morning sun. Our freezer is stocked as are our bellies and fridge. Thank you summer 2010 for being so fruitful.

Dinner for 160

Keeping in true fashion of this summers hectic lives we have been living, on one of our 10 day stints home, we cooked for friends twice and did a wedding in between. This was our third round of doing this and luckily the last (cooking twice for friends with an event in between, over 9,200 miles driven in between these 10 days bits at home). As far as catering goes, we learned a lot and fed a lot of people a lot of really good food. The menu was almost entirely vegan and all vegetarian, sourced as close to home as possible as we do in all of our cooking.

Roasted/Grilled Veggie Platters.

Grilled Tofu Kebabs with basil leaves wrapped on cherry tomatoes.

Falafel and Tabbouleh

Breaking the Seal

While I hadn't quite anticipated such a blog break, in ways it has been nice and also hard to figure out where to start on the return. In the three weeks since I last posted Ben and I have catered a wedding for 160, cooked for friends twice, driven to central Pennsylvania and back, swam in a mountain stream lake for 6 days in a row, spent 2 days unable to walk due to back trouble and sweat our asses off digging 60 lbs of potatoes from our garden, along with a garlic harvest, cucumber turned into pickle harvest and consumed more blackberries than any of us has ever done in our life.

Life is full. We are happy and now I am on the mend back wise, my mother has been down to visit us and save us from our busy selves twice and yesterday and today have been our first days that we have had to do nothing except be since the first week of May, which was really too long ago for a day to just be.

I'll be back with pictures soon, though these past weeks I tried to leave my camera behind a little more and enjoy everything in front of the lens. Hope summer in it's form where you live is treating you well.