It's the land of plenty

I cooked one of those sweet potatoes and ended up with five pints of mashed sweets... yes, from ONE sweet potato.  I dug the last of them this morning:

The larger ones are huge.  I'm not sure what to do with them, since I still have a bucket full in the house.

We went to Rasa Orchard this morning and bought a peck of Fuji apples for eating and a half-bushel of #2 Jonathans for cooking.  

As you can see, more than half the Jonathans are gone already.  That's because I made applesauce after dinner.  I intend to make an apple cobbler with some of the remaining apples in the bag.

I cored the apples and cooked them with the peeling on.  There is less waste that way, and it gives the applesauce a lovely color.  

There are eight pints processing as I work on this blog entry.  They only have to boil for twenty minutes.  I also have a quart of applesauce in the refrigerator, which we'll eat over the next three or four days.  

I picked green beans yesterday until my fingers were numb from the cold.  There are still some out there, but I guess I will let them go to waste.  It's only a few plants, but they are loaded with long, perfect beans.  Whoever advised me to plant Top Crop green beans did me a big favor.  

The late-planted radishes are huge!  Not pithy, either, but crisp and good (if you like radishes... I could live without them, but Cliff loves them in his evening salad).

Looks like we'll have eggplant parmesan tomorrow with our leftover green beans and ham.  I guess as soon as I finish this entry, I'll chop and freeze the last sweet peppers of the year.  

We had fried green tomatoes for dinner.  I like those even more than fried morel mushrooms, and that's saying a lot!

I usually bring a bushel or so of green tomatoes inside before the first frost and let them ripen; I've managed to have tomatoes past Thanksgiving, some years.  This year, though, as you can see, the tomatoes are all split at the top.  I'm fairly sure they wouldn't keep.    We do have plenty of tomatoes for the next few days.  

So, the garden was a fairly successful venture this year, and I learned a lot about fall gardening.  I'm wondering whether it would work for me to leave the fall carrots in the ground and dig them as I need them.  Do any of my gardening friends know?