A Variety of Harvest Pictures

One way that we are able to create much less waste is by growing, harvesting, using and putting away much of our own food. I love doing this. Not only does it mean we deal with much less packaging but also we have food that is much better for us and we know exactly where it came from.

  I had taken a bunch of harvest photos this year that I had never gotten put on this blog so here they are in this post. :-) In order of when they were taken - some of the harvest that we have rejoiced over this year....

 One of the earlier meals from our garden. New potatoes, green beans and cucumbers along with meatballs which had veggies in it and the sauce as well. So yummy!

 One of Mom and Dad's lovely watermelons - displayed by Aaron. Isn't it so cool??? Those watermelons looked funny (though most of them were normal shaped just yellow too) but tasted great!

 Aaron using the apple picker to get apples at Mom and Dad's.

 The grapes at my parents were really lovely this year.

Mara and Mom picking grapes. I picked grape leaves once as well to try making dolma but that never happened. I did however can a lot of grape juice and jelly.

 Green beans, husk cherries and cucumbers all did quite well in our garden.

 Boxes and baskets like this can feel overwhelming - both with how am I going to get these all processed and also just overwhelming thankfulness. God blesses us abundantly!

 Many jars of applesauce were canned.

 Nana gave Aaron her old juicer. It was so much fun to enjoy fresh yummy juices. We enjoyed a grape, apple, cucumber and husk cherry juice. It was really good!

 I love these big jars for canning juice in. I tried making husk cherry jam this year and I really like it.

 Snapping green beans over at my parents. It is a very fun job to do while visiting but not quite as much fun to do it by yourself.

 Final garden clean-up (though I do still have carrots and beets to dig) after the frost. We had covered the peppers for a couple of nights but we just picked everything (green tomatoes too) now. We only got our first frost last week which was extremely late for us.

 Apple sauce process.... I put yucky stuff in a bucket to go to the chickens (wormy parts, bad spots, etc), "good" cores and such go into a kettle which I cover with water and make apple cider from. Good pieces go into a put which I put a little water and cinnamon with and cook until soft. Then I add some honey and puree it and can it.

My pantry shelves are nearly full. Woohoo! Much of veggies actually go in our freezers too.

  When I can I use reusable jars, bands and tattler canning lids (for the most part - I do also use some metal ones which I will generally use several times as well). That means no waste is created either now or later. For frozen foods I will re-use containers over and over again.

  Do you put up food for the winter? I would love to hear about it.