My bounty!! What a harvest they are!!

Sorry, the last picture has nothing to do with our harvesting, it is a nice shot of Amelia's hair, I did it in a wedding veil pattern, and it came out really nice, and lasted a long time, very cool and tidy if I do say so myself!!

We have been busy around our house harvesting our gardens bounty, we had tomatoes, beans, peas, sunflowers,raspberries, peppers and grapes. They all did well but the beans, they do not seem to do well in my garden, not sure why! With all this bounty I have been busy in the kitchen making spaghetti sauce, tomato soup, veggie soup stock, and even more spaghetti sauce. There are still more tomatoes coming along every day to be readied for freezing, I may make salsa soon! Plus I have been blanching and freezing peas, freezing bags of raspberries(if I can get to them before the kids eat them all!), we have cut the sunflowers down to put out for the birds this winter too. Our biggest harvest has been the grapes though, we have had tons of grapes this year, and while last year I made conserve, this year it was straight up grape juice, easy to make and loved by my kids!! All of the kids joined in the work, they got paid in quarters for their work stemming grapes and rinsing them to get them ready for cooking. The grapes are so good, there are still some on the vines, and they smell wonderful, I have to bring them in soon before I lose the, but I currently have many gallon bags of juice in the freezer downstairs. The pictures are of the kiddos helping harvest the tomatoes, and of them munching on another harvest, grown in Gramma's garden, zucchini carrot muffins. They are fantastic, and my mom grew the zucchini(I get the ones that double as baseball bats, they make lots of muffin batches!!), and they also grew the carrots, they have tons of those too, and funny shaped and sweet, perfect for muffins, just wash and grate. So this summer has been a very bountiful year in our gardens, and a good thing since it is hard to keep these kiddos in food, they love their veggies and fruit, oh I forgot to mention the pears we got this year too, we had tons off of the little tree(now a big tree)that I bought a few years ago, I froze many for this winter to make pear berry crisp, but the kids ate many too, and Julianna loves my pear-apple sauce, so there are bags of that frozen too, now we will be going apple picking and making apple sauce and other yummy apple things to store for winter, if anyone has an apple tree they want picked for free let me know, I will be right over!!!!
gotta go feed the herd now, they have been busy watching the street crew outside dig up the road, fascinated by the bucket loader, and jack hammers, cheap entertainment, only costing me sleep and sanity, since they start at the crack of dawn!!!