How does my garden grow?

Yellow pear tomatoes plus blackberries. Green beans, potatoes, red and yellow onions and more.

The last few weeks it's felt like the dam broke. We put up over 50 quarts of green beans from one short (15'?) double row and that's not counting the many pickings we ate and gave away. The two rows of potatoes DH's dug so far yielded 2 bushel baskets plus another 20 pounds we ate or gave away. I have a half-bushel of yellow onions and almost that many red (purple) onions lying on newspaper in the shed. Haven't done anything with the garlic except pull some to eat -- still have to harvest and lay it out to dry before storing. Squash, cucumbers and now Sugar Baby watermelons are coming in daily, too.

And blackberries! This past week, DS has been picking blackberries every morning for our breakfast. Today he's over at my mom's and they're planning to pick her blackberries before he comes home. It's anyone's guess how many will make it in the bucket vs. how many get eaten but I'm sure we'll have enough to freeze a few bags for use this winter in smoothies or maybe in a cobbler.

Tomatoes started ripening in mid-July but it wasn't till this past week we had many worth eating. The first all had blossom-end rot, the curse of well-dependent gardeners, I think. Now we have them coming in by the dishpan and I'll be canning tomorrow -- probably ketchup as we're on the last jar from last year.

This year we planted some new-to-us yellow pear tomatoes. I've had them from friends' gardens but never tried growing our own till early this spring when I started about a dozen peat pots with seeds. They're so small and perfectly pear-shaped. The taste is sweet but with just enough tang it keeps them from being bland. And the color's lovely in salads or chopped for salsa. When we get overrun with them, I'll just toss the extras in with the other tomatoes for canning but I'm thinking some yellow tomato preserves would be pretty on the shelf and tasty, too.

The county fair's coming up and I always like to have a few entries in the canning classes. I'm wondering how the yellow pear tomatoes would look in a canned salsa, maybe using red onions, too. I know I'll like them dried and can already picture them as bruschetta -- they'll be darker dried than they are fresh but the yellow color stays true enough to add a nice dash of color to the table in the winter months.