End of season weigh-in

During the summer we kept a note of the produce we harvested from the garden.

I drew up a chart on a piece of paper and stuck it to one of the kitchen cupboards.  Every time we picked veggies from our garden, we would weigh them and make a note of it.  I dare say a few tomatoes slipped through the net.  Last week I totalled up what we had harvested over the summer:

Cucumbers                              11 fruit

Courgettes                               6.152  kg

Marrows                                   4.05 kg

Potatoes                                  6.848 kg
Peas                                        1.234 kg
Beans                                        .500 kg
Tomatoes                                 5.408 kg
Carrots                                     1.572 kg

We harvested from 7 July until the end of September.
We still have a bag of potatoes to empty.
The beans did not grow or produce particularly well - we will use fresh beans next year, not ones saved from the previous year.

Additionally, we picked a lot of spinach early in the summer, and grew sufficient lettuce all through the season for all our salad needs.  
We grew and cropped herbs - parsley, coriander, basil, oregano and thyme.

I was going to try to calculate how much these goodies would have cost had we bought them, but finding comparative prices for organic produce was a bit tricky, I perhaps should have checked earlier in the season.  However, N and I both feel that the cost/savings is not really the issue.  For us, the pleasure in being outside tending the veggie plot gives us so much enjoyment, it keeps us active and fit and there is real satisfaction in picking, cooking and eating fresh produce straight from the garden.  Oh yes, and the taste is far superior to any polished and polythene-wrapped tray of vegetables flown half-way round the world to sit on a supermarket shelf for a few days.

Weight-wise, maybe we don't produce a huge amount from our garden, compared to, for example, an allotment, but for us that is not the point.  We just enjoy the process.  It's been fun and a worthwhile exercise to photograph the garden as it has been growing, record the little successes (and failures) on this blog, and see what the totals are.  The winter veggies are in now and I will do the same.  Next year I shall try to remember to make a note of the varieties we grow - this year all the plant labels disappeared =:o .

The quilt is making progress. Here is the back view showing the quilting.  I'm sewing the strips together at the moment by hand.  I actually enjoy hand-stitching and hemming, I find it very soothing.

Here's a close-up:

I pin, then tack, then sew (not every time, but it made sense on this project)

And finally, the sky late yesterday afternoon was quite beautiful . . 

 . .  and just a short while after the sky positively glowed gold . . .

. . . today it rained!