Start with one-hundred twenty-five pounds of tomatoes and get busy. Over the previous two weeks, I boiled, sautéed, milled, chopped, and canned fifty-four quarts of tomatoey stuff. From roasted pepper tomato sauce to basil garlic marinara. I made V8-style tomato juice, too. And now after all of this work, all of the humidity from pressure canning the jars, all of the onions, carrots, bell peppers, garlic, basil, celery, and dirty pots and pans, I am finished with tomatoes for the year. This horde will last Caroline and me about two years. As winter rolls around we’ll still be enjoying the fresh tomato flavor of summer courtesy of Tonopah Rob’s Vegetable Farm.

Since June 15th, thirty-five pounds of beans have been picked from my twelve-by-fourteen plot out at Tonopah Rob’s Vegetable Farm. A few days ago Rob gave me a small rough-neck of carrots, I thought I could put them to good use, it didn’t even look like it was that much anyway. Turns out there were fifty-one pounds of carrots in there. Add to that my seven and a half pounds of garlic I have hanging up in my closet that was picked on June 2nd and you know I needed to hurry up and do something with them quickly accumulating food. Up until this past week, we were able to eat our way through the smaller harvests but with a few pounds of beans still in the fridge and the almost fourteen pounds I picked yesterday, it was time to get busy. I busted out the really large pot and got to boiling water. With the sink full of ice water I was soon blanching the beans and carrots. Into quart size freezer bags I stuffed beans and carrots and then added some fresh sliced garlic, quartered red onions, and chopped green peppers. For the next six months, Caroline and I will have a steady supply of mixed veggies ready for the steamer.