Victory Garden

My friends that own the land where I garden told me tonight that I had a beautiful Victory Garden and invited me back next year.  Grandpa would have been pleased.  I finished the harvest tonight, dug the carrots, potatoes, and onions and picked the rest of the tomatoes, peppers, and zinnias.  Harold will take the Garden Salsa peppers to work tomorrow to try and give them away.  They are so hot that I can't get anyone at my work to take them.  One of my friends used one in salsa and then had to use 3 times as many tomatoes to dilute it so she could eat it.  I'm going to mix the onions and the bell peppers in with the tomatoes and can the whole mess together tomorrow night.  I don't think that I will bother with potatoes again, the seed potatoes probably cost $3 or $4 and I ended up with a little less than a bushel.  I can buy potatoes here for about $3 a 20 lb bag so I don't think it really paid off to grow them, and they taste the same....  I have at least a bushel of beautiful carrots tonight and have been eating them all summer.  It turns out that two 20' rows of carrots is a lot.   And tomatoes!  I have another 2 bushel tonight, that makes about 5 bushel from my 34 plants of big tomatoes (I inadvertantly planted 5 cherry tomatoes too and could have fed a small army off those 5 plants).  I learned my lesson about heirlooms though, next year, back to the hybrids.  I can't taste any difference, any of my tomatoes from the garden tasted much, much better than from any store (and I know that I have eaten more tomatoes this summer than maybe in my whole life) but the heirlooms rotted like crazy and they are pink (not a good thing according to H).  I didn't mind that most of the varieties ripened over a long time period, and a lot of them are still green on the vines, but based on the rot, I'm going to Big Boy and Early Girl next year.  We'll see if it makes a difference.  I also picked the rest of the zinnias tonight.  I will miss them, they are the best variety and the one that I started from seed, so we will definitely have those next year.  I stopped and told him tonight that I was done, so I expect my garden will be plowed over by the weekend.  Though the garden has been a really good time, I bought Michigan apples today (Galas-wonderful) so it is officially fall now.  I'm going bittersweet hunting tomorrow.