Garden thoughts

We're starting to harvest food from our garden! Most dinners consist of whatever we can pick plus the occasional supplemental protein in the form of farm eggs or local meats. Yesterday, for example, we ate:

• cucumbers, hardboiled eggs, and tomatoes in balsamic vinaigrette
• sauteed green beans (Masai haricot vert and scarlet runner beans)
• thinly sliced purple carrots and beets (braised and then sauteed for a few minutes in olive oil and sea salt)

Today we ate:

• cucumbers and tomatoes with vinaigrette
• green beans again
• brats from a local pork farmer (I've found a person in the area who raises pastured pork with no additives/hormones/antibiotics in the feed...and the prices are just as good or better than the supermarket)

I have a really big garden, and I'm still surprised at how little it yields, relatively speaking, to feed our family. We still have to buy a fair amount of other staples for lunch and breakfast...and we rarely have anything left over to can, dry, or freeze. How did people ever grow enough to last them through a whole year? It boggles my mind.

I'm also reminded of both how easy it is to eat garden food...and how much work it is at the same time. You can walk around, pick some cucumbers and tomatoes, and eat them straight off the vine. But you can also spend 10 minutes shelling peas and only come out with a small bowl. I admit that I'm still way too used to opening up a bag of frozen vegetables.

I'm going to try my best to do a second planting this month whenever I take something out. I'm thinking lots of kale, salad greens, brussels sprouts, and carrots. What else grows well as a late summer planting?