A little harvesting

 Today I harvested some of this year's garden bounty.  It has been a cool summer, at least in my opinion, and not a great year for the garden.  It was also very wet.  The cabbages started to form heads but then just went slimy and rotted.  Things are already slowing more than in previous years, based on my pictures, and they never got as far as they did in previous years either.

Fortunately, the greenhouse stays warmer and the tomatoes are finally yielding.  Here's an assortment of tomatoes I picked yesterday.  There are black cherry, jaune flammée, big rainbow, yellow brandywine, sunrise bumble bee, and probably a couple of others.  I've already made some roasted tomato sauce for freezing and I'll be doing some dehydrating.  There are a couple of cantaloupes in the greenhouse that look like they might ripen before first frost....I hope so!  You can see a little bottle of Monin hazelnut syrup for my coffee in this picture - I'm not using that on the tomatoes.  It just lives on the counter near the kettle.

The rhubarb has had a very good year, and I harvested quite a lot in the spring.  It slowed in the midsummer, but is doing very well again now.  Here's some I chopped and froze today.  There were two more large size freezer bags like these yesterday.  I also made a crumble with some yesterday and made stewed rhubarb and plums that I'll be enjoying with my breakfast yogurt this week.

I also harvested some potatoes today.  I don't grow an awful lot of potatoes because my province is a potato region, so I can always get local potatoes and they are usually very well priced.  However, it's fun to grow some of my own as well.

This is the second year of actual production for two grapevines that I planted 3 years ago.  The first year they just got planted and didn't do much.  Last year they made some grapes but unfortunately the raccoons cleaned them off the day before I was going to harvest them.  This year, they have done really well.  Here's how they looked in August on the arbour.

I decided I would be very proactive about harvesting them, so I've cut some before all of them are fully ripe.  It won't matter because I'm going to make some jelly with them.  They are a mix of Beta (a table grape) and Marechal Foch (a wine grape).  The Beta grapes are larger than the Marechal Foch.  I'm not sure about their "typical" sizes.  It has been a very wet summer so I would have thought they got enough water, but maybe not enough heat to achieve full size.  Anyway, I've clipped some that seemed well on the way to ripeness, just in case the raccoons show up and pull off the same stunt as last year.  

Here's hoping that another week or so will allow for more ripening without raccoon interventions!