The Garden Chronicles - August 9, 2009

This is the last blog entry featuring apricots this season! The phenomenal performance of our trees yielded 20 pints of apricot preserves, a gallon of dried apricots, fresh apricots daily that we ate for three weeks straight off the trees, and this delicious apricot-raspberry pie. Not to mention the shopping bag and a half that we delivered fresh to our local homeless shelter when we ran out of time to preserve more apricots. Alas, apricot production is now curtailed, with just one tree continuing to produce somewhat sour and worm-ridden fruits. Nevertheless, this was one of our most astounding harvests of summer fruit.

I don't how to replicate this pie since I made it without a recipe from leftover apricot preserves and fresh raspberries picked the same morning. It could have been a contender at the fair, but we ate it all ourselves and enjoyed every bite!

We had a nice and reasonable harvest recently, enough to keep us fed this week, of string beans, zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, and pears. And one super-hot pepper that we are afraid to eat. It may go into a large batch of salsa.

It was a lovely day today which we enjoyed completely by taking a 10-mile run through our city and taking a dip at Lake Josephine.

What a wonderful summer we have had! The last few days brought us 4 inches of desperately needed rain, so no sprinkling of the garden today. The rain barrel overflowed, and we drained some of it into another barrel in case more rains come before we can use all the rainwater we have saved.