Where did summer go??!? I am looking around and I feel like we were just in July a few months ago.

When Covid hit and we were forced to stay home, I was ok with that. I was ok with the idea of being home and getting projects done without the guilt of ‘we should be doing something else’. We got SO MUCH DONE. We made the garden bigger, added more egg layers, meat birds and turkeys this year. We cleaned the garage, painted, reorganized, cleaned up the trees, burned our brush piles, built a turkey and meat bird coop and pen. We used an old garden shed as our new chicken coop. We added a pen area on that too. We took a few more camping trips even. And with a 1 year old, island camping is not the easiest thing to do unless you’ve done it a lot or grew up doing it.

But our main focus this year was food supply. Again, once Covid was here and we saw the shortages on produce and meats and then prices sky rocket we knew that this year we were going to grow enough to not have to rely solely on the store.

Meat bird processing day went great. Lots of lessons learned, but after that day we felt amazing. Knowing that we had provided our family with a lot of meat for the winter. (I’ll do a post on this later.)

Harvest time. We got A LOT. This year we had expanded and made a 40’x40′ garden. We had the plot tilled, new soil added, we put in posts and cemented them in, put up wire, a sprinkler system.

The big garden had: corn, pumpkins, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, sweet potatoes, red and white potatoes, zucchini and broccoli.

Our little garden had: more tomatoes, green peppers, herbs. lettuce, green beans. peas and banana peppers.

Last year we had built a produce stand that we put at the end of our drive way. This was a way for us to use up all the food without waste. If we had any extras that we couldn’t eat or use in time we would put it on the stand and let the neighbors take what they want. And then the idea was born of the Community Market. Any neighbor was to contribute if they wanted. It has been a fun little community deal.

This year we had a lot that we could put on the stand. But when all said and done I have: 19 quarts of tomato sauce, 12 pumpkins, roughly 20 squash, a laundry basket of potatoes, we froze over 15 bags of diced carrots and corn. In fact, we had about 176 ears of corn that needed to be picked at last minute due to a freeze warning. I have 9 quarts of canned pickles, and 2 gallon bag of tomato soup frozen along with six bags of 2 cup increments of shredded zucchini for winter baking.

This was my last tomato harvest. I am still letting the tomatoes rippen so I can use them.

I know this was a long, rambling post, but I had lots to catch up on. Hopefully I can get back into the routine of writing once a week! Until then you can catch me in the kitchen finishing up my canning or schooling our girls, which is another post in itself.

Have a wonderful week!!!