Oh my, so much to catch up on since July!

The deer are still in the neighborhood but not in our garden. Success! (They’ve gotten to Grant’s garden, though.)

Potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, onions, coriander, green beans, celery, kale, and more kale… all doing well. We didn’t keep up with the cucumbers, so they grew huge and stopped producing more.

The corn didn’t get enough water this season, so some of the plants and ears are small. That will be pretty easy to fix next year.

And the rhubarb, wow! We just planted it this year, and I’ve had to harvest some stalks because the leaves were so large and heavy that they broke.

We got plenty of blackberries from our own land in early August, but even on September 1st we were still able to pick more. I have a blackberry rhubarb crisp with hazelnut topping in the oven right now.

The artichokes also delivered this summer. I had to give them each an occasional bucket of water to keep them going.

Plum harvest was not than sufficient; in fact, we didn’t even get around to harvesting all of them before it was too late… but we got enough. The Bartlett pears are coming in right now, and the tree is loaded. (It’s also loaded with Asian pears, but they’ve never been tasty from this tree.) Grapes will be coming ripe next.

To top things off: Heather bought a dairy goat yesterday. Day one was tough, but she had a comparatively smooth milking experience this evening. The goat is still experiencing relocation trauma, but it sounds like things will settle down over the next couple weeks. We’re keeping her separate from Karen the sheep, but we’ll get them together soon.