Slacker Blogger = Harvest Tuesday

This post was meant to be for Harvest Monday... but I got distracted by Legos and never wrote it.

Raspberry Jam!

 I started out my week's harvest by heading back to the farm to pick raspberries.  Then I made up 14 jars of raspberry jam and 2 jars of raspberry sauce (for mixing into yogurt and stuff).  I'm hoping that the raspberry and strawberry jams together will keep us in jam until next year; I am really tired of picking berries now.

Peas and strawberries.

 The sugar snap peas are finally piled with fat pods, and the snow peas are just starting to have harvestable pods ready too.  Yesterday I picked 1 1/2 quarts of them for my mom.  Friday I picked another quart of sugar snaps for my trip south to visit friends, and Wednesday I picked half a quart.  Peas are one of my favorite things to grow in the garden, especially since the snow and sugar snaps are so expensive to buy at the store.  Shelling peas just don't seem worth it though, they are cheap and it would take up a lot of space to grow enough of them.  Somehow I ended up with one shelling pea plant in my sugar snaps though, so now amid my 63 sugar snap plants there is one shelling pea plant hiding.  I'd just pull it out but they are a tangled mass now, so instead I have to watch out for the pods and separate them from the others.  It's no fun eating sugar snaps and then accidentally biting into the tough, tasteless pod of a shelling pea.
 The strawberries above are from the yard, picked yesterday.  They went into a gallon bag and into the freezer, I'll continue to add to this bag until it's full then start a new one if they are still producing.  Not sure I'll get two bags though, the strawberries are definitely starting to wind down.

More peas, and a cabbage

 The Parel cabbages are just finishing up, I've picked 3 already.  They are about a pound each and very space-saving.  I find them to be excellent since we rarely manage to use up a whole large cabbage before it goes bad.  These are a one dish cabbage.  The combination of slugs, earwigs, and cabbage loopers meant i lost more than a few leaves to insect damage, but the centers of the heads were untouched and perfectly lovely.  I'm not sure how much longer the Derby Day cabbages will go, the heads are about the size of baseballs and very firm but they are supposed to get much larger than the Parel.

Pearl onions, Alex's carrots, cabbage, and lettuces.

 The bonus to Oregon being among the three states in the Union that are not swelteringly hot right now, is that I still have lettuce!  In fact, I haven't lost a single lettuce plant to bolting this year.  The only thing that has bolted in my garden is the cilantro, but that's to be expected.  Of course, the downside to that is that the eggplants and peppers (my biggest heat-loving plants) are incredibly sad, and I'm beginning to lose hope that they will recover from this.  If I had known what the weather was going to be like this summer I would've grown spinach, and much more leaf and stem crops and less heading and fruiting crops.  Oh well, you know what they say about hindsight.