I’ve just added a sidebar with harvest poundage, divided into fruits and vegetables. I also put in the totals from 2010, which is when I began weighing my harvests. Learned that from the rest of you garden bloggers. But keeping up with the spreadsheet on Excel is tedious. I seem to run out of time and/or steam. At least for now, I’m up to date for this year.

Navel orange--I ate this one for breakfast this morning and it was incredibly sweet

We have dwarf fruit trees and small raised beds in a tiny southern California yard, plus a rabbit-infested community garden plot that is on a former gravel parking lot. My harvests can’t compare with the huge hauls that I see on other gardening blogs, but it’s enough for us.

My dwarf avocado tree has a good fruit set this year for the first time ever, about 21 avocados.

I harvested 224 lbs last year from my yard. I had hoped for 500 lbs this year with the addition of my new community garden plot. But that little plot hasn’t been as productive as I had hoped, and rats and possums ate almost all of the fruit harvest in our yard this year. As a result, I’ve downgraded my harvest goal to 300 lbs. At this point, I doubt that I’ll even reach that figure given that it’s already August and I have harvested only 130 lbs. Will I be harvesting another 170 lbs in the next five months? I seriously doubt it. Not with all of our night critters.

I trapped yet another possum last night, the fourth one in four weeks. We managed to kill one rat, but I suspect that’s just a drop in the proverbial bucket. I’m typing this at night and I can hear the dang rats running around on our neighbor’s peach trees. Hey, at least I don’t have to contend with deer.

Granny Smith apple

I’ve managed to make and freeze only two quarts of spaghetti sauce so far this summer. I don’t see a heck of a lot of new tomatoes coming along, so that may be it. But my larder is certainly not bare. I still have tomato soup and spaghetti sauce that I canned last year, plus a large assortment of jams and preserves. I made a gallon jar of dill pickles last year and we’re still working on that.

Amish pie pumpkin

Mostly what I grow in my garden is hope. I dream of future harvests. And that’s what these photos are of: future harvests. For example, the Amish pie pumpkins like the one above are supposed to grow up to 90 lbs. Well, I got several beautiful pumpkins this year, but they were mostly between 1 and 2 lbs. Each one will make one pie. And that’s fine. I don’t need a hundred pumpkin pies.

This is pretty much it for my blackberry harvest. I get a few each week, but don't even bother to weigh them. I just pop them right into my mouth.

And that’s how my garden grows.