Guess who’s started eating solid food? She’s six months now, sitting up unassisted for a few weeks already, and had been trying to mooch food off my plate constantly. It was time. So far I’ve made her pureed apples, pureed oats, and pureed pumpkin. She liked the apples and oats but she LOVES pumpkin. All about the pumpkin.

I made about 12 cups of pureed pumpkin and stashed it in the freezer. I need to buy and puree at least a few more pumpkins to be sure there’s enough of the stuff this winter for the big eaters as well as the newest one. Mmmmm…pumpkin soup…pumpkin risotto…pumpkin bread… Oh man…pumpkin muffins. My love of pumpkin borders on the unseemly.

Next up, green beans. Our pole beans that had dwindled down to barely a handful of beans a day through all of September have perked back up again. This was yesterday’s harvest:

I didn’t pick any for three days and that’s what we got. The ginormous ones aren’t tough and stringy because they grew so quickly. We had a lot of rain, but it isn’t cold yet. I think we’ve got at least one or two more bean harvests ahead. We ate a bunch fresh with dinner last night. The rest I’m going to save for the baby so she can have good stuff from the garden through the winter even though she isn’t ready for kale and collards and the other bitter stuff. I’ll puree and freeze some, but most I’ll blanch and freeze so I can prepare them differently as she starts to eat more textured foods.

I think that’s the second-to-last cucumber of the year. They’ve been so, so good, but we’ve eaten a ton of them and we’re ready to move on to what the fall garden has to offer us. This week we’ve got three kinds of kale, collards, and broccolini ready. That’s probably the last tomato, too, but that is more than fine. I’m getting close to being sick of them. I think I’ll either freeze or can all the tomatoes we’ve got piled up on the countertop and in the fridge. Sauce, maybe.

Oh–and the shallots finally cured! Aren’t they pretty?

They took way longer than the garlic to dry out. Not sure why that would be.

Which reminds me, I need to get this year’s garlic and shallots in the ground this week. We’re supposed to have a few days of sun until Thursday, so I’ll plan to get them in on Thursday when the ground has had a chance to dry out a bit.

PS: I have discovered that, yes, I can bake bread with someone strapped to my chest. I wore Ladybug in the Ergo while kneading the dough and it went just fine. And then we had some damn good bread to show for it.

PPS: When it comes to bulk food, I listen to Tama. She suggested I store our bulk grains in these, so that’s what we’re doing.