Today, the girls spent the morning working and pulling fruits and vegetables from the garden. The blueberries have perhaps one more harvest left but the blackberries have come in strong with many more on the way. Their tiny fingers are much more adept at picking berries than are mine. Charlotte is more partial to blueberries while Olivia attacks both with gusto. Juana has managed to freeze a few pints of each, however, for us to enjoy in the colder months ahead.
We turn next to the green and red pole beans that are climbing up the fence. The bush beans I planted earlier were consumed by (I think) rats that live near the garden. We fill a basket that we will consume later as a stir fry. As the girls rest on the park bench in the garden, they pull and eat a few of the frying peppers that are near the sunflowers.
The cherry tomatoes have started to come in and Juana grabs most of these while I get the ones she can’t reach. We then harvest the potatoes in grow bags. I pour the soil onto the floor of the greenhouse and the girls rub their hands through it looking for tiny tubers. “I found a potato,” exclaims Olivia. She and her sister are stepping and spreading the soil all over having a great time as they place their harvest in a blue wire basket. I then bring an old potato over to Charlotte. “That’s disgusting,” she comments. “What’s that?” I tell her that this is a potato that has sprouted and if she wants, we can plant it and harvest its babies in Fall. She thinks that is a great idea and she and her sister put the tuber into a grow bag and partially fill it with soil.
After the harvest, they both are a bit of mess and need to be hosed down, something they enjoy given the heat and humidity. Even though they have been eating their way through the harvest, they are hungry and ready for lunch.
The dog days of summer (named for the fact that the star Sirius appears before the morning sun at the end of July) come with both ample harvests and a new dog. Her name is Dori.
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