Posted by shiny on July 12, 2026 at 00:00 and edited at September 20, 2026 at 10:37

A whole year of growing, digging, fermenting, and canning eventually comes down to a shelf. Here's what was actually on it, as of early July:

Pantry - 2× pasta sauce - 14× tomato sauce - 4× tomato paste - 3× (huge) jars of pears with cardamom - 4× beef bone broth - 2× rendered lard - About 10kg of various dried beans - Copious dried chillies

Freezer - 4kg frozen beans - 12× pesto cubes - No peas left

Clamp - About 20kg of giant agria potatoes

That tomato line alone — 14 jars of sauce, 4 of paste, on top of everything already eaten fresh or given away — is the direct result of hauling roughly 100kg of tomatoes out of the garden between January and March. The 20kg of agria sitting in the clamp is what's left after the Christmas potato harvest that broke the bucket, and the bed that followed it.

Why bother

The running total for the year wasn't really about the dollar value, though the numbers are hard to ignore — about $1,200 worth of tomatoes from a few dollars of seed, weeks where the grocery bill was under $30 because the butcher, the baker, and the garden covered the rest. It was more the shape of it: spring is thin, summer is a flood, autumn is the last of it, and winter is living off what got put up in jars.

Then the seedlings go back under a heater, the cold frames get built again, and it starts over.

This wraps the harvest series — from last spring's first seedlings through to this year's larder. Next season starts now.