abundance!

I worked at the farm today for a few hours... and came home with a LOT of produce! 34.5 lbs, to be exact. (isn't that insane?!?)

dd and I harvested summer squash today for an hour - FOUR wheelbarrows FULL. I took a picture on my cell phone but will have to email it to myself to upload it here. It was crazy - must've been about 200 lbs of squash, quite easily. We took two home - one was 8.88 lbs! The other was 5.4 lbs. They were MASSIVE!

This is definitely the time of year when the garden is going full-tilt and you can't even give away zucchini. The farmer said the local food bank won't accept fresh produce from farmers because they find the people coming to the food bank don't know what to do with 8 lb zucchinis, and packaged food is easier to prepare. Sad statement on our society, imo.

Alas, I digress. I wanted to share with you the abundant variety of produce that is ripe these days:

several lbs of tomatoes - will Can them tomorrow, might make salsa as well
kubota winter squash - is curing
a pint of strawberries - eaten practically before we got home
a couple lbs of shelling peas - shelled, blanched, and frozen
broad and green beans - trimmed, blanched and frozen
carrots - cut up, blanched and frozen
broccoli - cut up, blanched and frozen
leeks and potatoes - will be combined into soup
oh, and the zucchini. (how could i forget!) - will shred some and freeze, make zucchini bread, stuffed zucchini for dinner one night, and will probably *still* have some more with which I will have to dig out more recipes for. Last year I compiled 15 different zucchini recipes. I'll probably end up using all 15 recipes on these two massive squash.

The feeling of satisfaction is grand when one is putting up food for winter. The freezer is slowly starting to fill up with produce. I'm trying to locate more wide-mouth canning jars for free that I can do some canning with. Pickled beets, pickled green beans, and canned vegetables and the salsa, too. Lots to can.

Anyhow today was all about food - harvesting and putting up. It felt sooooooo good to know I'd gotten all that food in exchange for my labour and time, because i have an abundance of both to give. :)

Abundance of blessings around here.