The beginning of August is rough around here. It’s like drinking from a water hose – too much, too fast, all at once.

The tomatoes (yes…45 tomato plants) give me about six to ten pounds of tomatoes per day – some are paste tomatoes, some are slicing tomatoes with a few are cherry tomatoes thrown in for variety. I have three varieties of green beans and pick about two to three pounds per day. The zucchini – well, let’s just say I can’t even keep track of them. The cucumbers get hacked up every day or two and turned into pickles. The beets are pickled, the onions are drying, the cantaloupe and carrots are still growing. And our freezer is full.

It gets pretty intense trying to keep up with all of this. It takes a minimum of two hours early each morning to pick whatever is ripe. It takes longer if the weeds bother me enough to make the time to start pulling them out.

And then there are hours in the kitchen to freeze the beans, turn tomatoes into spaghetti sauce and pickle the beets.

I’m not complaining, we are fortunate to be rewarded with a good harvest (what the groundhog didn’t eat). But it would be just a little bit easier if it wasn’t everything at one time.