A full circle moment

It's impossible to imagine what actually happens in a garden when you turn your back on it for a minute (in our case, 2 days - hence the blog down time).  It's a miracle, actually.  We are having the perfect summer for a perfect, productive garden.  The harvest rate is accelerating, so being prepared to do something with all your vegetables (and fruit) really bocomes a full time job.

Getting it all into one weekend is hard enough....getting it all into one day is exhausting.  I have mentioned before the garden is basically in maintenance mode.  The heavy labor part is done.  Now it's weeding, and watering, and weeding some more, and feeding, and weeding, and staking, and weeding.  I think you get the picture.  We're still covering the garden in grass clippings, so while he mows, I'm weeding and spreading the grass.  Once we get the whole thing covered the weeds should subside.  Right now, they are loving the heat and the lack of rain.  In addition to the weeds, the Japenese beatles are rearing their ugly heads.  I'm always crawling around looking for any sign of the pests that can potentially take out perfectly healthy crops.  A garden needs daily supervision and TLC.

Anyway, we got home expecting to harvest green beans (another 1.5 lbs).  What we didn't expect was to see the Japanese Eggplant ready to be picked!  That was amazing.  Two days away and there they were!  Basil......completely out of control.  We picked to the bare bones and spent most of the afternoon making pesto and freezing.  It's really very easy - just leave out the cheese (see recipe in Blog dated 7/10/11).  All you do when you defrost is add the cheesse and you are good to go.  Today we made 6 batches of pesto (24 cups of loosely packed basil leaves and there still more to go.  We just ran out of pine nuts and walnuts).

So the day took a turn I didn't really expect.  We needed to do something with the basil before it went to seed.  Waiting another day would have been too late.  So not a lot of housework got done.  Stepping around piles of laundry is part of our summer tradition.

The best part of the day was dinner.  In the back of the freezer we had eggplant parmesan frozen - it just needed to be reheated.  The eggplant was from last year's garden.  I even had a gravy frozen (also from tomatoes from last year's garden).  All we needed to do was cook the pasta.  It was easy and it was delicious.  It was truly a full circle moment.