Harvest!

Happy Monday! How was your weekend? This weekend was harvest time up here on the farm. My garden has kind of petered slowly, but my dad's is undergoing a kind of grand finale, and this weekend we all benefited from his hours of toiling outside. The main attraction was the harvesting of the pumpkins.

This year my dad grew "Big Max" pumpkins, which are supposed to be able to grow up to 72 inches in diameter. His didn't get quite that big, but the biggest one weighed something like 85 pounds. That's a lot of pumpkin! The boys and I have enjoyed watching the pumpkins in the front pasture get bigger and bigger, turning deep orange as summer drew to an end. We've also chased countless wild turkeys out of the pumpkin patch, so we have a kind of motherly attachment to them.

All together there were 8 huge pumpkins - our own mini pumpkin patch. I'm sure my dad will carve a few of them together with the boys, and I'm hoping he will give me at least one to eat, since my own "pumpkin patch" is nothing but one sad looking vine this year.

After the pumpkins, we moved to the second-most-exciting crop: popcorn. This is so cool - did you know that popcorn grows on a cob, just like regular corn? That's right, it doesn't grow in a paper bag filled with fake butter and salt - who knew? This is blue popcorn, and it didn't do very well this year because of the cool weather we had all summer.

However, after putting an ear in a brown paper bag and microwaving it for a while, it came out looking like this:

And the rest of the bag was filled with perfectly popped popcorn - YUM! I highly recommend growing this some year with your kids. Eating popcorn off the cob might be one of fall's most missed-out-on pleasures.
Thanks so my dad's huge garden, we now have TONS of fresh food to eat: corn, popcorn, pumpkin, Honeydew melon, two types of watermelon, tomatoes galore, bell peppers, sweet potato squash, and beets. I'm still contributing a zucchini and yellow squash here and there, so between our two households we are doing pretty well. Fall has definitely always been my favorite season, and now that we have a real harvest to celebrate, it makes it even better.

First of the harvest:

Our lettuce is in! I've been eating salad every day so that none of it goes to waste. How is your garden doing? Everything else I've planted is a bit behind schedule due to that fact that I've had to replant everything several times. The main culprit this year seems to be snails - I personally killed 12 snails this morning and my boys kill them all day long. We used to pick them up and throw them as far as we could in the opposite direction of the garden, but they were obviously making their way back. Last week I went to water the pumpkin patch and all that was there was dirt covered in shimmery snail tracks. I almost cried. I know the news of snail killing up here on the farm will make some of Moses' more tender-hearted friends sad, but it has to be done.

To be honest, I'm really not a great farm girl at heart. I hate getting my hands dirty and even though I tried really hard, I still don't like those chicks. BUT, I've been reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" books, which my dad read to me when I was a little girl, and they have been motivating me. Those pioneer women worked SO HARD, and their family's survival depended on them doing their work quickly and well. Of course, that is not the case with us, but reading the books makes watering the garden and fishing poop out of the chickens' water seem a bit less dirty and a little more exciting. Oh, and now I wear my fluorescent pink rubber gloves every time I go outside, too, which makes all the dirt and snail slime and poop more manageable. And the salad is really good, too!