Farm days

I love to garden. Well, Jared does all of the really hard work (like the infrastructure) and I do all of the fun stuff, like planting, weeding (ok, that one's not so much fun) and harvesting. This morning was a typical morning, doing housework. At about 10:30 or so, I decided to take the kids outside and do our "farm chores." You know, like feed the chickens and the cat, and pick the vegetables. We came in with quite a haul today. We harvested a few handfuls of green beans (the kids eat a lot of those on the way to the basket), our mandatory 8 crookneck and 2 zuchinni squash (thank goodness I pulled out our second crookneck plant already!), 6 japaneese eggplant, our first red tomato (yippee!), two heads of romaine lettuce and 4 cucumbers. Pearl was ready to pick some basil too, but I told her it had to stay. The we went to the orchard, where we got some chicken eggs (7 yesterday, only 2 today), half a basked of pluots (the spotted ones and the green ones) and one ripe peach. We were pretty proud, and took our wagon to display our spoils to grandma and give some veggies to great grandma. I am truly sad that my mom doesn't have a kitchen at the moment, or she would definetly be getting her share of squash!

So, later in the afternoon when Sam was napping, I decided I would rather weed the garden than clean the kitchen (yep - it is that bad). My watermelon plant is growing on the edge in the bottom corner, and it is a tangly mess with a bunch of weeds on the edge of the garden, so I thought I'd work over there and see if we had any baby watermelon yet. I got the bestest surprise ever! A ripe watermelon, and a huge one too, it is 14 pounds! Lucky for it I didn't see it before, because I always get excited and pick them too early. This one just fell off of the vine when I touched it. Plus, there's another huge one out there waiting for me. I think the plant that survived is the orange watermelon - it's in the fridge, I can't wait to see how it tastes. I also got two butternut squash - they had better be good with all the squash beetle battles I have been having. We love to cube the flesh and roast it with potatoes. So, the question now is, who wants to come and eat all of these vegetables?