Kindness In The Garden

When we returned back home from a 10 day summer beach vacation, I was expecting my veggie garden to be in full harvest. Hubby had set up an automatic sprinkler system. Many of the vegetables were just starting to bud so, I thought it only realistic that we'd have a semi abundance of peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, eggplant and tomatoes upon our return. I was wrong! Apparently since we weren't home, and our dog wasn't around barking, a few rabbits managed to sneak into our garden, under the fence and eat themselves into oblivion. Yes, they ate every single viable thing. There was nothing left.

When out neighbors heard of our misfortune, it didn't take them long to jump into action and share their overabundance with us! This is what I found on our doorstep the other morning:

Some other local neighbors of ours also brought over a ton of tomatoes, lots of basil and lots of cucumbers. Since then, I've been busy on my kitchen pickling the cucumbers into pickles, making tomato sauce, baked stuffed tomatoes, tomato salad with the basil and my all-time summer favorite: tomato/carrot soup with dill (the rabbits didn't eat my basil or dill but they did wipe out my parsley). I made two big batches of pesto (great in the winter over linguine) I froze as much as I could. The rest we ate almost every single night! Delish!!

Thank goodness for the kindness of strangers and the kindness of neighbors. A blessing, for sure!