Our peach tree gave us a bumper crop this year! An Italian friend of Paul's Aunt Tina gave us the tree as a sapling, and it is now old enough to produce peaches. We did have to pick them a bit on the early side to avoid donating them to the local squirrel population.
The peaches were sufficient for a few small batches of jam. The varieties include straight peach, blueberry plus peach, and cranberry plus peach.
Speaking of jams, our Kousa Dogwood trees provided berries again this year for more jams. The Kousa trees don't produce every year, but this was one of the years that they did. The berries are frozen and jam making will be a cooler weather project. We can understand why Kousa jam is not made very often; processing the berries is a multi-step process because they have a lot of tiny inedible seeds.
The Italian Long Beans (thank you, Lisa, for the seeds!) gave us some great meals. We had never imagined green beans with marinara sauce & pasta, but this type of bean is great in that dish.
(There is actually some pasta hiding under all of those beans.)
This isn't a harvest item, but the Dolls Eye plant that is in the oval garden produced berries this year. Note the little black 'pupils' in the middle of the 'eyes'.
We don't go wild with Halloween decorations but we do like to put a few out.
Updated November 2021