Garden update - red chard, tomatoes, and TURNIPS galore!

Hi everyone! I've been gone for a while and the spring/summer gardening season is winding down, but before I tear up part of the ground and reorganize things in preparation for my fall garden, I thought I would post a little update!

Our location and climate seem to be perfect for growing hardy herbs and pretty much all root vegetables. Once it got hot enough outside, the tomatoes and peppers (hot and sweet) started taking off too. Here are the tomatoes:

They're shortish plants, but they're producing a lot of fruit, which is what matters to me. And here are pepper plants (habanero, as someone correctly guessed in a reply to a previous post):

The lettuce situation is horrible though! Maybe it's because by the time I had the fence and other defenses of the garden set up, it was already too hot outside for the lettuce that had been nibbled on by rabbits to grow back. I don't know, but I got almost no lettuce. :(

I'm going to try again in the fall. Lettuce doesn't even germinate when it's too hot, right?

The swiss chard turned out especially well. I just harvested this, and there's about twice this amount, or more, still waiting in the ground:

And look at these TURNIPS! The vegetable we got the most of was the one I have very little idea what to do with!

Turnips, turnips, turnips...

They're huge! Maybe I should become a turnip farmer and try to make a living selling turnips for $.80 at the grocery store for the rest of my life. (Are they even worth that much? LOL.)

So I wasn't sure what to do with these bitter roots at first, but I did find some good baked recipes and we threw together a vegan stew one night, which was really good:

This contained turnips, chard, kale, potatoes, celery, leeks, and onion, and we let it slowly cook all day. I love vegetable and broth soups with spices like salt and pepper, garlic, turmeric, and cayenne pepper. Adding lentils and tomatoes 30 min. or so before serving made it more hearty and filling.

-@summersolstice