Harvesting the garden at Piebird has been hilarious--only because of the incredible (some might say excessive) amount of carrots we keep digging up. Buckets and buckets, every vessel imaginable is full and littered across the new kitchen floor. And I sort them into categories of eat now, eat soon, eat later and cellar-worthy (eat mid-winter). It has been interesting to learn about harvesting, storing and preserving vegetables, as I have never had the opportunity to do so in the past. Never before have I had the combination of acreage, incredible soil, a neighbour (Murray Becker) who comes over and plows for us, an extremely resilient husband who can handle planting 10 million carrot seeds during the peak of bug season and a growing business that enables me to feed  lunch, dinner and over night guests many different dishes involving carrots. Its truly been fabulous. Speaking of dinner and carrots, recently at Piebird we had another house concert but this time combined with a full vegetarian meal prepared by Heal Thy Health. At the dinner I had the pleasure of meeting and serving Deb Smith from Powassan who knows everything about canning and preserving fresh food. A few days later, Deb is over here with her pressure canner and we were bubbling and chatting away in the kitchen trying to lessen my enormous pile of carrots. Deb and I canned 18 jars (30 cups, half a large sink full) of sliced carrots, now they sit very pretty on the shelf, awaiting my mid-winter carrot slump. (I will do anything to avoid buying carrots shipped all the way from California and beyond...though I might think differently in bug season!). Thank you Yan for planting the garden! Thank you Deb for the fun afternoon of canning!

What I find quite funny about the enormous-amount-of-carrots ordeal is that I kept getting so stressed out when my little piglet, Olive, would continuously find her way into the garden and  make it her life's work to dig up and devour every carrot to the point where it really seemed we would not have a harvest at all to speak of. But it appears there was no need to stress, as it seemed Yan planted enough carrots for all of Eastern Canada. If Olive hadn't eaten all the other carrots, I can't imagine where I would have put the them. Neighbours mailboxes I guess...