Our pet birds love their mixed veggies, so we decided as part of our frugality efforts to make our own. So we have frozen corn left from last year, and frozen green beans. Peas, we decided, are too expensive if we have to buy them to freeze them, so next on the list was carrots. Despite our successes this year, there's no way there were enough from our garden to freeze....so we hiked off to the store and bought a 5 pound bag on sale.

On to chopping....

A few weeks ago (yes, all of my posts this past week started out this way...) we brought in a surprising number of carrots from the garden (ok, S. did). I think they probably took a bit longer to mature than the seed packets said...but better late than never.



We had quite the assortment of sizes and colors...


Quite a few (maybe a third of them) had pest issues...I'm not quite sure what they are. Maybe root borers of some sort, I suppose? Either way, despite the pests, lots of them were just fine and sweeter than any carrot I've ever had. We'll definitely try the Danvers Half-longs again next year, as they seemed to do pretty well.

We've been getting more squashes, cucumbers (more on those later), tomatoes and the occasional okra every few days.... Oh, and lots of black beans (and the occasional navy bean).





We're not doing as well tomato-wise as we had hoped due mostly to hornworms. Last year we had a lot of problems with blossom end rot, but this year we got smart and put down some of our hens' crushed oyster shell around the tomato plants. Those are ok...but those that we didn't do that for (including a couple of quite prolific volunteers form last year) are still having issues.