Wednesday, September 03, 2008

the BIG tomato

well, summer is almost over and we have spent much of our time gardening and preserving! we've had a bumper crop of tomatoes this year, but here is the "monster tomato" from our garden so far -- 1 lb and 1 oz. i knew there would be some sceptics in the family, so i've taken a picture of the tomato on the kitchen scales as proof! we've had many tomatoes that weighed in at almost a pound, but just not quite.

so far, we've canned 70 qts of tomatoes & 24 pints of jalapenos, and we've frozen 15 qts of sweet corn and 56 qts of apple sauce. we still have more tomatoes and jalapenos coming on, cucumbers picked to make pickles, and more zucchini than we can keep up w/ giving away!

we have over 30 canteloupes coming on (and have already picked 3) and have about 20 watermelons on the vine. the way we have it figured -- the canteloupes and the watermelons will probably all be ready at the same time! if that happens, i'm not really sure what we'll do w/ all that produce!

we have had SO much fun watching our garden and watching the grandchildren "helping" in the garden. then grandpa started making all these rules like "no throwing dirt" and "no kicking dirt" and pretty soon it'll be "no having fun"!

i told jerry if he wasn't careful, no one would be going to the garden w/ him if he had all those rules! it's rather hard for me to enforce rules on the grandkids when i'm not willing to follow them myself! but, i guess i could just throw a rotten tomato instead??? i'm sure that would be just ducky -- don't you think?