This year, I had every intention of doing a better-than-normal garden—to save on money! to reduce our carbon footprint! to cut down on our pesticide consumption!—but it didn’t go so great. We planted green beans not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times, and even then, only bits and pieces of a few rows made it. We plodded along, picking a little here and a little there. It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t great, either.

And then we didn’t pick the sweet corn in time. (Alice was decimating the corn patch, but we thought she was just picking it young because she didn’t know what corn was supposed to taste like. Turns out, the corn was ripe.) Also, the peppers, basil, and tomatoes got frost-bitten (I planted too early, my bad), the kale got eaten, the tomatoes got a fungus, and the strawberries drowned in weeds.

So, all in all, it was a fairly ordinary year.

Sigh.

Stats:
Rhubarb, chopped and frozen: 1½ gallons
Strawberries, sliced with sugar: 19 quarts and 2 pints
Strawberry freezer jam (4 batches): 9 pints and 4 half-pints
Sour cherries from our trees, frozen: 20 one-cup bags and 8 quarts
Sweet cherries (picked 33 pounds for a total of $61): 7 quarts canned with sugar, and 9 quarts frozen with sugar
Zucchini relish: 7 pints
Swiss Chard, steamed: 7 eight-ounce bags
Green beans, frozen: 36 quarts and 1 pint
Sweet pickles: 6 quarts and 2 pints
Corn (overripe), frozen: 28 quarts
Roasted Tomato and Garlic Pizza sauce: 25 pints, 1 half-pint
Blueberries (ordered from afar, 4 scant gallons for a total $80), frozen: 27 pints
Nectarines (4 bushels at $32/bushel): 41 quarts canned, 5 quarts frozen, 12 pint bags dried
Tomatoes: 31 quarts, 5 pints
Peaches, Glohaven (2 bushels at $32/bushel): 23 quarts
Salsa: 49 quarts, 6 pints, 1 half-pint
Roasted tomato sauce: 33 pints
Grape jelly: 9 pints (weak), 7 pints and 17 quarts (good)
Grape juice with (⅓ cup per quart) sugar: 6 quarts
Grape puree: 7 three-cup freezer boxes
Applesauce: 2 bushels Lodi for 40 quarts, maybe (I forgot to record this) and 2 bushels of Super Gold, Golden Delicious, and Stayman for 39 quarts

Oh yeah, and TWO BEEF.

Notes:
*The children are at the age where they can be counted on to do much of the picking. My older daughter, especially, picked a huge portion of the sour cherries, green beans, and strawberries.
*Skip the fancy heirloom cucumbers and get one basic kind. Plant a lot of them, in a row (as opposed to mounds). And then do at least 14 quarts of sweet pickles. Because potato salad is so much better when loaded with tons of chopped sweet pickles.
*Hopefully we’ll have enough salsa! (My husband thinks we should reduce the garlic a little. I don’t agree.)
*Finally, we like our grape juice, because I’m adding plenty of sugar (in the form of a simple sugar syrup) to the jars before topping them off with juice.
*Next year, buy four bushels of Lodi apples to turn into sauce. It’s our favorite, now and forever, amen.
*The strawberries are slowly killing us. We can’t seem to stay on top of the weeds. It feels like a losing battle. Are we doing something wrong?
*I didn’t do any pesto because I had a bunch left from last year. Even had about a whole pesto torte left over!
*Our tomatoes, especially the juice ones, get hard white spots. A fungus, yes? They are still edible, and perfectly fine for canning, but they’re not the most attractive. Maybe we should plant in a different part of the garden next year?
*Peppers got nipped by a frost. Totally underwhelming.
*On recommendation from a friend, I planted Red Russian kale. It was delicious—so sweet!—but then it got utterly destroyed by some super-aggressive bugs. Oh well, the chard, at least, never wavered.
*Next year, watch the dogs—when they start stealing the corn, it’s time to pick.
*I LOVE BEEF.

This same time, years previous: the quotidian (10.24.17), our cracking whip, aging, boy in a blue dress, brown sugar syrup, love, the Tooth Fairy.

This same time, years previous: impressing us, three feet, winter squash soup with corn relish, field work, the reading week, random, the quotidian (10.22.12), breaking news, a silly supper, how to have a donut party, part III, moments of silence.

Recently, my older daughter picked up a gig at a neighboring farm, caring for all the animals, morning and evening. This means she gets up early (dark early) to get to work, coming back home just as the rest of us are finishing up breakfast, and then going back up again at the end of the day.

It’s so odd, this business of raising people who came from my body and yet aren’t anything like me. A job that would require me to haul my butt out of my warm bed and go shovel manure and swing hay bales and fill water buckets would shrivel my soul, but my daughter acted like she had won the lottery.

Ever since she got the job, she’s thrown herself headlong into taking charge. She organized the medicine cabinet, and sorted all the blankets, putting the damaged ones in a separate pile. She wormed the horses and donkeys, but only after re-calibrating the dosages — based on what she’d learned from the two vets who run the other farm she works at, the doses seemed high — and then she sent an email to the owner, notifying her of the changes. I showed her how to use Google Docs, and she’s written up her own chore schedule, as well as medication charts, etc.

Anyway, the other morning after my run (because I do haul my butt out of bed to go running in the dark, #inconsistencies) I trekked over to the farm to see where it is she’s been running off to every day.

My daughter was down at the chicken coop when I arrived. She held up a broken plastic scoop. “I threw them some grain and the cup went flying.”

She introduced me to Tulip, the lame lamb. “She has trouble stopping once she starts running, so she crashes into things,” she said.

She filled water buckets, and then headed into the barn to feed the horses, donkeys, and rabbits. The first time she cleaned out the male rabbit’s cage, he came running at her, stamped his feet, and next thing she knew, she was drenched with rabbit urine.

Finally, still in my sweaty running clothes and now thoroughly chilled, I headed back to the house.

This same time, years previous: back in business, a dell-ish ordeal, the quotidian (10.20.14), autumn walk, a pie party!, how to have a donut party, part II, classic cheesecake, rhubarb cake.