We picked 27 pounds of tomatoes on Saturday. It was the first time this year that I’ve actually weighed anything. I always think produce weighs more than it does. I estimated the tomatoes would weigh close to 40 pounds, so when they came in under 30, I decided to revise my estimates for last week. Instead of 20 pounds of tomatoes last week, I’m going to say we picked 15 pounds last week.

Of course, we picked a lot more than 27 pounds of tomatoes this week. The 27 pounds was just what we picked on Saturday. But we had been picking tomatoes all week. 35 pounds would be a very conservative estimate. That’s pretty exciting. And there are a lot more that will need to be picked in the next few days.

We have been dehydrating tomatoes and making salsa like we’re crazy. The Ronco dehydrator can’t keep up with the influx of tomatoes, so we’ve been using our oven as well. It actually has a dehydrate mode, so we can set the temperature, timer, etc. I wasn’t sure how hot to set it, but so far we’ve been using 140 degrees and it seems to be working well. We tend to cut the tomato slices thicker and thicker in an attempt to get more tomatoes on the trays at the same time. 1/2 an inch is about as thick as I dare go, but it makes it easy to get a ton of tomatoes in the oven at once.

I didn’t keep track of all the peppers we’ve picked this week, but I’m guessing we picked about 20 large green bell peppers, 30 jalapeño peppers, 20 banana peppers, 10 serrano peppers, and 10 cayenne peppers. I try to give away as many hot peppers as I can, since we have so many. Anytime I give away peppers, I always include some hot peppers and tell them they can throw them away if they can’t figure out how to use them.

As for me, I’ve started getting creative with my use of hot peppers as well. I even chopped up about 1/3 of a cayenne pepper into my fruit smoothie today. I think I’ll use 1/2 of one tomorrow.

We also started picking our cantaloupe this week. So far they’re just parked in the fridge, but I expect to cut into them in the next few days.

We can’t simply share with our neighbors anymore; the harvest is just coming in too fast. We have had to resort to other methods of handling the incoming produce. For starters, we’re drying tomatoes as fast as we can, which isn’t very fast. We’re also packing stuff up and delivering it to family and friends that we think will use it. It’s amazing that it’s come to that, but it’s also really fun. This is why we have a garden… well, this and all the amazing things we make fresh. Today’s salsa and guacamole was amazing.

As we were loading things up to take them around, I realized I hadn’t taken any pictures yet. I missed taking shots of the beans and beets that were already bagged and loaded, but you still get the idea.

I think we picked a lot more stuff this week than we normally do. The tomatoes have just been going crazy… Almost as crazy as the zucchini. The corn is on. The beans are finally on. The peppers are just amazing. The tomatillos are coming so fast that I have even been throwing some away because I wasn’t able to pick them soon enough. It’s been a really great week for harvesting things.

I haven’t gone out of my way to count or weigh everything, but I’m guessing we picked between 80 and 100 tomatoes this week. That’s a lot of tomatoes. Luckily we have been able to give some away. The tomatoes look like they’ll continue coming in at this rate for a few weeks. These are going to be great weeks. Yesterday we did a tomato cook-down with some hot peppers. It really turned out well… but at a ratio of 2 cayenne peppers to about 30 tomatoes, we’re not going to use up those hot peppers nearly fast enough.

We also started picking and eating corn, and it’s been really great. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot more corn out there. The beets are looking good. We picked four or five beets this week, but I don’t think we’ve eaten them yet.

So from a harvest perspective, it was a great week.

The weeds have been getting out of control recently, and Charmaine has really been working hard to get the cleaned up. She’s really made great progress along the zucchini row along the fence. It’s like a completely new garden. She also tilled under the remaining potatoes, lettuce, broccolini, and cabbage (and all the weeds that were intermixed). She ran into a bit of trouble while tilling those under… the tiller found and grabbed some sprinkler funny-pipe, twisting it around the tines of the tiller and binding the tiller down. In her attempts to free the tiller, she wound up breaking the welds that hold the handles of the tiller to the tiller itself. So we’ll need to find a solution for that before the end of the year.

I disabled the sprinklers in that section in hopes of avoiding a flood. Well, that section stayed dry, but the lawn flooded. I’m still not sure how or why. We did a bunch of digging and investigating, but haven’t figured anything out. It seemed almost like a sprinkler pipe was broken under the lawn, but as we’ve turned on sprinklers since then, everything has been fine… it hasn’t flooded again. I don’t like problems that go away without an explanation, so I’m not satisfied yet. Kyle should be coming back this week to add some curbing to the new side yard. I hope I get a chance to ask him about it and have him take a look and tell me what he thinks.

As we were closing our garage today, a hummingbird flew inside. We opened both garage doors, but the poor bird seemed unable to find its way back out. It kept trying to fly higher, smacking against the ceiling time and time again. It was very upsetting. Charmaine cut a couple tall stalks of hollyhock from the front yard and I was able to hold them up to the bird so it could eat. Suddenly a second hummingbird flew into the garage. This was exactly the opposite of what we wanted to happen. The second bird flew right out again, but the first bird refused to follow it. It was still willing to eat from the hollyhock stem and eventually trusted us enough to stay feeding as we brought the stalk lower and forward, out of the garage. The whole ordeal lasted about 15 minutes.

Also this week, we picked a million pounds of zucchini, a bunch of lettuce and cabbage, some tomatoes, peppers, beets, and tomatillos. The pumpkins are starting to turn orange, which is always fun, but it probably means we’re not going to get any other winter squash. It’s just too late in the year for it to be starting right now.

We’re heading full speed into harvest. These are the types of posts that bore me to write. There’s really nothing new happening, just more and more stuff picked from the garden, and it’s almost always the same every week. Of course, it’s not boring to actually pick it and eat it, but I won’t always have a new exciting thing to talk about.

So what’s new this week?

Our neighbor brought back a few raspberry and blackberry starts from his parents’ house in Alpine, UT. They are not the same variety of blackberries that we had before, so I’m excited to see how they turn out (if they live). The blackberries are looking pretty good, but the raspberries are having a harder time so far.

We’ve started picking tons of zucchini. I’m sure we picked at least 10 last week, and it looks like we’ll have even more this week. The crookneck yellow squash is starting to come on, so it won’t be just a game of peppers and zucchini anymore.

Pumpkins are also starting to pop up under the leaves of the squash plants, and that’s always fun.