Mid August feels like the calm before the storm when it comes to gardening and food preserving. Some of the crops have already come in, like peas, strawberries, raspberries, and the first wave of Applepocalypse. And now it’s just…quiet. But at the same time I know that in the next six weeks, 
everything will be harvested and need to be urgently preserved. This will include beets, onions, tomatoes, corn, and more. And then there will be a few straggler crops that get harvested in October, like squash and potatoes.

It seems the weather in late spring / early summer set things back a bit. For a while it was looking like the garden just wasn’t going to do well, but in recent weeks we’ve seen crops come up to their usual volume. This is good because we rely on the garden to provide us with food throughout the year. We buy very few vegetables because of the garden and how we preserve it.

The freezer and shelves are starting to fill up

The first big harvest of the summer was rhubarb, which a whopping 70 pounds. While that’s not yet a record for us, we usually have a second harvest in late summer that should put us into a new record haul. All of this is currently washed, chopped, and frozen in a chest freezer.

We’ve recently run out of rhubarb wine, so in the not-too-distant future I’ll be using a chunk of this rhubarb supply for winemaking.

This was our banner year for raspberries. We usually have, like, five or six berries, but this year we’re at four and a half pounds and counting. For the moment these are being frozen for later use, likely in my husband’s overnight oats or in desserts. I’m kind of tempted to try raspberry wine, but it would use up everything we have and I’d much rather have the berries on hand for when we want or need to use them.

Applepocalypse was the biggest food processing event so far, with 154 pounds of apples making 26 litres of juice. (It’s called Applepocalypse because it obliterates all plans and free time for several days until the apples have been processed.) When writing the first draft of this post, the next sentence was: “Applepocalypse Junior is coming this week — there’s one more tree to harvest apples from that ripens a few weeks after the first trees. Provided we get our usual amount from this last tree, we’re looking at a record haul for apples too.”

However, we went and did the second apple harvest this week. Last year we picked every apple we could possibly reach on the back yard tree and came home with 50 pounds. This year we filled up our four Ikea bags with 163 pounds of apples and we could have harvested at least two bags more. That tree was extremely productive this year. Unfortunately, that means Applepocalypse Junior is now a full-scale Applepocalypse and my upcoming weekend will be dedicated to juicing everything and canning the juice.

Making plans for what to do

Because last year was such a productive year with certain foods, we have an abundance still left — so I have to decide if I’m going to do more of the same and add to our overstock, or try something different.

The biggest case of this is beets. We had an enormous haul last year, and we have dozens of jars of pickled beets and beets in water still on our pantry shelves. We’ll have to assess what we have and figure out how much to pickle or can to top off our stock, and then with what’s left…? I’ll have to dig out my cookbooks and see if there are other ways to preserve beets. I sometimes make beet wine, so that may be in the cards. We might also try juicing beets and freezing the juice.

For tomatoes, I know I need to stock up on pasta sauce and butter chicken sauce as we’re just about out of those from last year. But after that…? We have a lot of salsa, ketchup, and tomato juice left over from last year, so I don’t need more of those things. I may do more of the sauces than I usually do since we just barely made it through the year. But I might also try other things, such as possibly tomato wine. (I’ve always been curious!)

One thing I know I have to do differently this year is make a big batch of curried pickled cauliflower. I made one jar on a whim last year because I really don’t like cauliflower and I was skeptical, but it was incredibly delicious. This year I definitely want to make up a full batch (or two)!

The current state of the garden

Here are some photos from around our garden! It’s looking full lately!

This is the current view from the back deck:

Along our sidewalk is our primary bean patch. We’re growing black beans and kidney beans.

We’re growing regular, purple, green, and orange cauliflower and our first harvest was this lovely purple one. We did also get an orange one (sometimes called cheddar cauliflower) but it was so bug infested it went straight into the composter.

Our annual mega-haul of cucumbers continues this year! We juice all our cucumbers and freeze the juice, so we can add it to kombucha for extra flavour and nutrients.

Our cabbages are coming along nicely. These will all be made into sauerkraut.

And, lastly, the beets. They are HUGE this year. It’s hard to tell the scale in this photo, but this is larger than a softball. We’ll be harvesting them in the next several days or so.

And that’s a wrap for this month’s update! The overwhelm of harvest will hit any day now!