How does your garden grow?

Now that it's September, you'd think our garden would be winding down, but it seems like we're just hitting our stride. We planted late this year because we were traveling for most of May, which means all of our crops have come in a bit late.

Last year, we started with just a small plot next to the house and a few containers, but this year we were able to open a much bigger second garden in the corner of the yard. It's crazy to think we went from this to the pictures below in just a few months.

For the past month or two, we've been in the throws of zucchini/eggplant/chard/kale overload with no end in sight, and now our tomatoes and peppers are finally starting to come in.

We lost track of the first few zucchini plants to bloom, so we wandered out to the garden one morning to discover these monsters. Holy smokes, giant zucchini!

I ended up just shredding the biggest zucchini to use in muffins, and it produced an entire batch of muffins plus 15 cups of shredded zucchini to freeze. Ridiculous.

The other two zucchini, along with those first eggplants, went into two delicious batches of Smitten Kitchen's ratatouille. Our first round of tomatoes went into one of our favorite summer dishes, a tomato tart. They've also become Beckett's new favorite. They're so sweet that he thinks he's getting dessert for dinner.

(Bottom two photos courtesy of my husband. He was very proud of himself.)

If you're also suffering from zucchini overload, I highly recommend Smitten Kitchen's zucchini fritters (per her suggestion, we had them for dinner topped with a fried egg and a tomato salad (of course) on the side) and this curried zucchini soup from Emeril (we made two batches, one for lunches and one for the freezer). Oh, and Smitten Kitchen's zucchini bread (I made muffins) is the best I've had.

We're looking forward to lots more harvesting to come.