Our Long Overdue August Harvest Update

Wow, this is embarrassing! September is almost half over, and we still haven't updated our harvest totals for the month of August. We can only milk the excuse that we're exhausted from grape picking for so long, and a week and half later is probably long enough. But not to fear, we have still been keeping track, just on our kitchen whiteboard rather than the blog.

In case you can't read Greg's fine penmanship chicken scratch, here are the numbers from August:

0.7 ounces of Anaheim peppers
1.6 ounces of red peppers
1.7 ounces of strawberries
2.2 ounces of "Nebraska Wedding" slicing tomatoes
5.0 ounces of Poblano peppers
1 pound, 3.4 ounces of carrots
2 pounds, 6.3 ounces of cherry tomatoes
6 pounds, 7.1 ounces of "Early and Often" slicing tomatoes
7 pounds, 3.3 ounces of Roma tomatoes
25 pounds, 4.9 ounces of zucchini

and 20 eggs!

This is kind of a good rebound on several fronts, especially the tomatoes. Last month we were complaining about the various maladies they had, and while those have continued to be an annoyance, we've been able to harvest lots of nice tomatoes. We still throw some into the compost bin for blossom end rot or splitting or bug attacks, but we've also been able to make our own salsa, spaghetti sauce, BLTs and salads without having to buy any tomatoes. The only bummer at this point is that we haven't quite had enough (especially all at one time) to can any tomato products - salsas and sauces -  for this winter. But that just means we've been busy enjoying the fruits of our labor while they're in season.

In other news, we've acquired a handy new gardening tool! Or actually, it's more of a blogging tool. You may have noticed that while we love to add photos to our posts, the quality of the shots usually isn't the greatest. And as all amateur photographers know, the best way to get better pictures is to buy an expensive camera! Just kidding. But yeah, we did go buy a new, more expensive camera.

This one, a Panasonic Lumix FZ47. Now, real photo experts will immediately notice this isn't a true SLR, but it is still a huge step up from the pocket point-and-shoot we had before. It's called a bridge camera, which is a good "inbetweener" for novices like us. Greg took a photo class way back in high school, and wanted to try out a camera that offered full manual control, which these do. Now, obviously it's going to take a lot of education and experimentation to figure out how to use those settings to get good photos, but we'll see if we can't make this blog a bit prettier by doing so.

As a start, here's a picture from the first day of messing around with the new toy, a portrait of official farm cat lay-around-the-house-and-do-nothing cat Velma. She contributes absolutely nothing to the urban farm, but hey, she looks good doing it.

Fall's First Harvest

You might think that late fall is a quiet time on the urban farm, but we seem to always be busy. In fact, the past few weeks have been prime harvesting time. But what are we harvesting? Didn't we already say that there was no food growing on our homestead when we bought it? Well, here's a bit of a clue. This picture of the house shows one section totally harvested.

Yep, that's right. It's a tree with all of its leaves already fallen. And where are said leaves? Certainly not on the lawn...

That's because LEAVES are our first harvest in our new home! Now don't worry, things haven't gotten so dire yet that we plan to eat them. Just like you can't eat a lawn, you can't really eat fallen leaves either. But I suppose after several steps through the food chain, these leaves will provide us some nourishment, albeit indirectly.

You see, leaves are a vital component of great compost. We told you earlier about the compost bin we built, but we still haven't done much to fill it. Lots of different kinds of organic matter can be composted, and we'll get into more detail on how that all breaks down in a future post. But leaves are a really handy source of carbon-rich compostable matter, and with all these trees, we had a great source of them.

The best way to compost leaves is to shred them first, but having bought our home in October, we haven't actually bought a lawn mower yet (and weren't quite ready to decide on one anyway). So we found a different tool.

That's Greg using our Toro Ultra Leaf Blower/Vac. This thing really sucks. Literally. And it shreds and packs the leaves into the attached bag. It's been a near-daily task the past month to spend at least a  little time working on vacuuming the leaves off the lawn, and as you saw in the first few pictures, we're pretty much done with the front yard. The back is still a work in progress, but it's not just busywork when you think of it as a harvest. Check out our bounty!

With any luck, these leaves will last us well into next year as we add them bit by bit into the compost bin. And if we do that right, eventually we'll have fantastic broken down material to add to the soil in our garden boxes. So, from that perspective, I guess we actually will be eating these leaves!