At least the heat is good for something

The past 8 or so days here have been between 90-95 degrees, and the next three days are supposed to be about 100 with heat indexes at around 110-115. It's days like these that I honestly have a hard time getting excited about much, and style points fade knowing that anything I'm going to wear is going to get sweaty during the day.

Lest I complain too much about the weather, though, I will say that this hot weather has been absolutely amazing for our large garden. Here is the tomato haul from the past week...

Day 1, the start of the binge (sorry for the camera phone picture).

Three days after that, a bigger haul.

Three more days and yet another huge batch.

It looks like an absolutely huge amount of tomatoes (and it is), but one of our major goals this summer was to pick and then can enough tomato sauce, paste, and other random assortments (including BBQ sauce, Bruschetta spread, etc) so that we didn't have to buy anything from the store for the next 12 months.

It's a rather ambitious goal, and to meet it, we planted 21 tomato plants. Within that 21 are 11 romas (which include several different variety) and 10 other tomato plants (with about 3 different varieties). As the pictures above show, we've got a really good start so far on our goal, and if we can just keep things watered (or get some timely rain), hopefully the production won't slow down too much.

When we got our house, one of our major buying points was getting a house with a yard large enough to do a garden, and we've dug up a little bit more of it each year to plant more things. We have a couple huge piles of compost, and I have to admit still feeling a bit giddy each year as the plants get larger and larger and finally bear fruit.

There's no easier way to know where your food comes from.