It's early October and the garden is still producing. We had eggplant curry tonight with some of the eggplant from the garden and last year's canned tomatoes. The weather continues to be erratic. We had weeks of zero precip and finally it did rain but we got an entire month's worth in two days which waterlogged everything. I actually had crop wilt from too much rain. Things have dried out now and we are yo-yoing with temperatures. It was upper 80's yesterday and today but should return to more fall like weather tomorrow. The really bad thing about the super hot weather of a few weeks ago is that most of my lettuce bolted. It's not supposed to be in the 90's when you grow romaine.
The most thrilling news is that we harvested sweet potatoes. Lisa was over and I said to her "I just want to take a peek, I am curious if there are sweet potatoes in there". I'd never grown them before and everything I read said to wait till the first frost killed the vines to harvest. Well, we started poking around and oh my goodness. It was time to harvest. There were sweet potatoes the size of new born babies. I got positively giddy with the first one I harvested and didn't realize until Lisa commented on it that I was stroking the sweet potato like a baby. The kids got wind of what we were up to and came to help us out. They were so into it. I remember loving to harvest potatoes as a kid. It's like digging for gold. It was a lot of fun to watch them. One patch of sweet potatoes yielded 80 lbs and I've got one more patch to dig.
The eggplant continue to produce like crazy. I was demonstrating which bugs to squash a couple weeks ago and reached out and practically touched a snake that was wrapped around one of the bigger plants. All macho "I'm-so-cool-I-can-squash-bugs-bare-handed" bravado was dumped as I squealed long and loud. I am now harvesting eggplant with my body as far away from the plants as humanly possible.
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