Navigating to the place where I write my blogs, I noticed that Sunday was my 400th published blog post! That’s a lot of writing! I have really enjoyed sharing so many different things with you all that I find interesting on a weekly basis. I hope you have enjoyed coming along for the journey!

Number 401 is about my garden harvest. This summer has been a very nice summer. Some rain, more sunshine than last year. The garden did quite a bit better. We didn’t get out hiking as much as I would have liked, but the hikes we did go on were more technically difficult and it was fun to challenge ourselves since there were fewer of them. But I do love the changing of the seasons.

People often ask me what my favorite season is, and I usually say summer, but fall is right up there with summer, along with spring and winter! I just love the change. There are unique things that I enjoy about each season.

One of the reasons I love fall is because fall is harvest season. We harvested our potatoes this past Monday. I didn’t plant enough rows, but I ran out of time and seed during the planting season and never got back to it. But we got way more than last year, even with less plants. We’ll see if we have enough to last till next spring. I hope so. We have also harvested much of our cabbage, all the broccoli, almost all the squash and have 2 zucchini left to harvest in the next couple of days. The beets didn’t do well, so I purchased some from a local garden stand.

The onions did fantastic and I have a large quantity for canning and saving for the winter. Probably not enough for the whole winter, but way more than I’ve ever gotten. The last crop to harvest this fall is the carrots. I usually leave them in the ground until after the first frost. My kids did however pick a couple the night we dug potatoes and they were huge! I didn’t think we’d have any as they took so long to germinate. Some didn’t germinate and I decided to try replanting them. They won’t be ready for sure.

Cabbages did really well and I tried a new recipe this year. I don’t like sauerkraut, but I did find a recipe in the Ball cookbook for pickled cabbage, so we tried that. It turned out pretty good. I guess we’ll find some good ways to use that throughout the winter.

I planted cauliflower and had given up on getting any. I had beautiful leaves, but no heads. Or so I thought. I went out to pick peas and noticed one of the plants had a head. It had been a while since I had even looked at the cauliflower because I had mentally given up on it. That head was small and already past the usable state. But I had 2 more plants with heads as well! They are beautiful. I guess I should never give up until I am pulling out the plants.

Oh, and the peas. I have gotten quite a number of peas, however, every time I pick them and set them on the counter so I can shell them, they get eaten so fast I don’t ever get any set aside for the freezer. That’s alright I guess. They didn’t really produce much until the last 4 weeks or so, but they have been pretty steady since then.

I probably said this before, but I didn’t like gardening when I first started, but the longer I do it, and the more I try to grow a good garden, the more I enjoy it, especially this time of year.