Cutting up green peppers for the dehydrator…once dry, these will be stored in a ziploc bag in the freezer. I use them for camp meals, and in the winter when imported peppers are expensive. Mine are grown organically, so I know the quality is good. These are ‘Fat and Sassy’ plants I started from seed and wrote about in March.

The harvest is small this year. Everything is about a month behind. It’s the first of September, and I have had only a handful of ripe tomatoes, a few zucchini, a few bush beans. The basil has done well. The strawberries and blackberries were productive. The carrots are nice. I may have a good crop of grapes to make into raisins. But no overwhelming bounty to deal with.

Also drying are peaches and zucchini, as well as some pesto. I’d never dried homemade pesto before, but it dries easily and is tasty in camp with mini ravioli and vegetables. A pot of tomato sauce simmers on the stove this afternoon, and after it cooks down I will add chopped onion, garlic, carrots, zucchini, green pepper, basil and other herbs. I call this “garden sauce”, and freeze it. It provides the basis for many dishes in the winter when the garden is only a hazy memory.