Tomatoes are coming in, along with eggplant, peppers, garden huckleberries, and green beans. It won’t be long before the rush to harvest is finished and the garden put to bed for winter. For now, there is a lot to get done to preserve what we can of the growing season.

August can be a time for vacations. Today, that usually means my spouse spending time with her sister in Des Moines, leaving me alone on our property. These are not really vacations the way we visited Stratford, Ontario while our child was in high school, but they serve as a getaway, or in-place retreat. Time alone provides a new perspective on the quotidian. I welcome that from time to time.

The okra harvest has been what I needed. Enough to make some dishes, and get a couple of bags of slices in the freezer. The plants look exceedingly healthy. The gumbo I made with it Sunday was delicious.

This is a great year for hot peppers. The jalapenos look better than I’ve ever grown, and there are a lot of them. Last night I took some leftover taco filling and fried a sliced jalapeno, a tomatillo, four diced cherry tomatoes, then mixed it together with half a cup of rice. The re-made meal was quite satisfying. I made four different condiments with them.

I’ve been waiting for celery to mature and we are almost there. I have three heads in the refrigerator drawer, and five more were harvested on Saturday. They will be processed and frozen for winter soups, and vegetable broth. It was a challenge to make room in the freezer.

Now that celery is starting to come in, I need to go through the freezer and arrange a place for soup ingredients. This is grated zucchini, celery, and leeks, along with parsley stems, fennel stems, and other odds and ends. Organizing things should make it easier to fit everything in. The challenge is to process everything from the garden without buying a second, separate freezer.

Tomatoes have begun, and there do not seem to be as many as last year, at least not yet. This two-month period of tomato ripeness is one thing gardeners live for. If there are enough, I will can whole plum tomatoes. The rest are to be eaten fresh, cooked in dishes, shared with family, and otherwise donated to the food pantry. In my weekly discussion with the food pantry manager, because of donations from large stores like Costco and the local grocer, they tend to have a lot of tomatoes before mine would arrive.

I cleared the garlic plot, then put grass clippings down to suppress weeds. I raked a circle from the middle to start a brush pile for fall burning. There is a multi-day tree trimming project in my future, so there will be multiple burn piles.

For the moment, I bask in the abundance of a well-grown garden. Time is increasingly spent in the kitchen part of the kitchen-garden.