Picking up and returning to normal

Thanks to everyone who left comments and sent kind words my way. This has been one of those hard times, and it is very helpful to be reminded that we have people thinking of us and have support. And, as we always seem to do, we are getting back to normal.

Last weekend Jeff's dad visited, and we had a very nice time barbecuing, harvesting the garden, going out to dinner, going for a short hike, and just hanging out.

The haul from the garden this year was less than last year, partly because of a wet and cool summer, and partly because we planted less potatoes. Overall we had about 4 1/2 pounds of beets, 10 pounds of carrots, and 16 pounds of potatoes. We ended up with three giant bags of beet greens, and even though we had harvested all of the Swiss chard a couple of weeks ago, it seems to have started growing back and we have a bumper crop. And possibly most exciting is that we finally harvested some rhubarb.

We were away when we would have started getting some rhubarb in early summer, and then the plant shot up a large flower stalk and stopped producing the the part of the plant that we would eat. We had to leave it alone so that it would regenerate energy into the root and not kill the plant. We know now that as soon as a flower stalk starts to appear we should cut it off so that the plant doesn't use so much energy that way. But, just at the end of summer it started shooting out regular stalks and leaves again. I am not 100% certain that this is the right thing to do, but we are starting to have frosts at night, and since that would likely kill the rhubarb leaves/stalks, I just cut them all off so that we could get at least a little bit of tastiness out of our rhubarb plant this year. I do worry a bit that cutting all of the leaves/stalks may end up killing the plant so that it will not come back next spring, but I don't think so. In the words of my internship friend Jeff J. (who grew up in North Dakota, with weather not so different from what we have here), "Rhubarb is bad ass." I think it will survive.

This free-form rhubarb tart just came out of the oven:



We will be enjoying it shortly :-)