Happy New Year!

I can't believe it's been so long since my last post. In fact, the last post was by my husband while I was on vacation with our daughters in New Mexico. Now, why would I take a vacation in August, the peak of growing season? Well, when we bought our home, it had many wonderful features, such as the greenhouse and the yard, but it also had some serious drawbacks.

Worst of these was the kitchen, which had not been changed since the house was built in 1940. It had lower-than-standard counter heights, no space for a dishwasher, and very little cabinet space. The adjoining dining room was so cramped, we couldn't entertain more than a few guests without turning the table diagonally or adding a table in the living room. So we embarked on a radical kitchen renovation: add a structural beam in the basement to level the sagging floor, tear down the wall between the kitchen and dining room, pull out the cabinets, add a food prep area with a high counter, and provide enough cabinet space overall that we could stop using the linen closet as a pantry.

We chose to do this in August while on vacation so that the bulk of the work could be done with the girls out of the house. Our younger daughter has asthma-ish problems, and we didn't want her home, breathing in construction dust. We also wanted the kitchen finished before harvest season hit full swing so that we could be canning and preserving our hard-won garden bounty. Every contractor we interviewed assured us they could finish the renovation in four weeks.

It took over three months. We began the 6^th of August, and the kitchen was not completed until the week of Thanksgiving. There are still outstanding issues. Our new induction range arrived with a manufacturing defect. It is scheduled to be fixed on Tuesday. Also, somewhere along the way, someone made a measurement error, and our refrigerator does not quite fit in its allotted space. So we're now looking for a 30-inch-wide fridge that won't seriously bust our budget.

The renovation ate all of my spare time, hence no blogging. Worse, with no kitchen, I couldn't cook most of the veggies we were growing. What on earth do you do with an enormous garden full of veggies when you can't cook? You give them away. We gave veggies to all our friends and neighbors. When the girls returned to school, we sent bin after bin of cherry tomatoes, bush beans, broad beans, bell peppers, cucumbers, carrots, zucchini, summer squash, husk cherries, and sunflower seeds to their classrooms as snacks. Every Monday, I'd pick everything ripe and bring it to the food pantry at Beverly Bootstraps, a local charity. By the end of the growing season, we'd given them nearly 100 lbs. of our fresh, organic produce.

We did manage to freeze some tomatoes, corn, and roasted green chile. We stored potatoes, beets, and squash. I dried broad beans and blue corn for meal. Some friends kindly took all our basil, converted it into pesto, and gave us half the batch. Many of our attempts at storage failed, including green tomatoes wrapped in newspaper and stored in our basement, which simply rotted, and dehydrated red chiles. After hours in the dehydrator, I ended up with red chile leather that then went moldy two weeks later.

And the worst, most frustrating part of this was that the garden was, with a few exceptions and despite raids by a determined woodchuck, wildly successful. Even the corn stalks infected with Gibberella produced bushels of corn. The husk cherries completely overgrew their bed and carpeted the garden paths with their fruit. The bush beans kept on producing right up until the first frost. Even now, with the garden blanketed in snow, we're still picking fresh kale, cauliflower, and broccoli.

At last, the renovation is over, the holidays are past, and I have time to reflect on our successes and failures. Seed catalogs have begun arriving in the mail, and I'm beginning to think ahead to this year's garden. So over the next few days, I'll be posting on all the varieties I planted, reporting on what worked, what didn't, and what I'm considering trying this year. First on my list: tomatoes.