early september harvests

 my garden is in full swing now. yeah, it's late. it's always late. this year it's partly because i got everything planted so late in the season, and partly because i'm growing a lot of long-season heirlooms.

 first pair of lemon cukes. i always have bad luck with cucumbers. this year i planted them three or four times, and almost every time the seedlings were taken down by either slugs or earwigs, no matter how hard i tried to protect them. finally got them properly started in early july.

 lots of green left on the branches. hurry up and ripen!

 wall o'maters. i put up a row of about 15 tomato cages all attached to the wire fence that separates the garden from the rest of the yard. that way they wouldn't topple over. and it made a neat little tomato hedgerow.

 these gourds had the same problem as the cukes, getting eaten over and over as seedlings. now they're huge! you can't quite tell from the photo, but the vines have climbed all the way to the very top of that lilac tree behind them. most of the gourds are high up. harvesting could be tricky.

 squashes got a kinda slow start too, but now they're rolling.

 i juiced a big batch of cukes and tomatoes, and the chickens LOVED eating the leftover pulp. i haven't needed to compost anything all summer thanks to the chickens.

 mega-egg! someone laid a double-yolker last week.

 i picked up a couple little tiny egg pans. it really is a handy size. very easy to wash. also very easy to leave in the sink and not wash for a few days, which is part of the reason i got two.

 and they make for a very round meal. this almost looks like some kind of bland future-food from a dystopian film.

 i'm all about eggs over easy, but i've finally started branching out a little bit. i made stir fried rice, and hard boiled eggs:

 they were pretty impossible to peel nicely though.

 a few fun tomato specimens!

 it's my second year growing reisetomate, a.k.a. clusterfuck tomatoes, one of my all-time favorites in both looks and taste. they're like fused clusters of grape tomatoes.