Veggie Good!

Degen sorting the vegetables he harvested with Darren.

We got the garden in late after a long, cold winter and this summer has been cool & mild. So only bit-by-bit have we been pulling in crop this year. So far, we have gotten peppers, cukes, squash and cherry tomatoes. When I can...well, I can! 

This is my third or fourth year, and I am still trying to work out a dill pickle recipe that I really love. I tweaked a recipe this year and the result is juts about right. 

Kyrie processing cukes for dill relish.

An alternate version of our dill relish.

Last year, I made a sweet & sour pepper sauce with our abundance of peppers. This year, I found a recipe for pickled Italian vegetables and turned it into an Italian garden relish. 

Degen processing mixed vegetables for our Italian Garden Relish.

Italian Garden Relish

Flowers

This year, Darren planted a bulb garden in front of the house. We have really enjoyed the flowers that have come in, and it has been so nice to have fresh flowers in the house. 

Let The Planting Begin

Well, it is that time of year! Darren is outside almost every evening and nearly all weekend long. He gets outside sometime around lunch and won't finish up until dark. There's the regular maintenance of the yard, but there's also spring planting and tending to the flower beds, as well as the raised bed garden along with any special projects that might come up. The kids are in & out either exploring the yard or playing with friends. I see them through the windows or when they come in for a snack or drink. Everyone comes in at night hungry and dirty!

So, these are photos of the new garden bed that Darren built in the back along with a small natural play area (which I have been bugging him about for years). It is mostly just a regular garden bed, but there's a stump walkway in the back that leads to a climbing tree. The kids really enjoy this a lot! I would actually like this bed a little bit bigger, but I have left making that change up to Darren. All of the rocks around the garden came from our backdoor neighbor's yard. They were dug up when they put on an addition. Our neighborhood is very rocky, and anyone who tries to dig anything at all hits rock.

The blackberry bushes are in the back of this bed. I wish all the berry bushes looked like these.

The asparagus patch is front & center.

These are the spring photos of the garden. It looks pretty brown as mostly it is just seedlings, though some of the berry bushes really filled out last year and look great already. Darren has put in a lot of different plants & seeds. We have gotten some good growth, but we have also been hit by bugs & critters that have left the state of some of the plants in question. We are really going to need to be on top of things to get a good crop this year... after last year, the word is out that the smorgasbord is here. We strive to keep an organic garden, so we are trying to control the pests with beneficial insects and barrier protection. We got 1000+ ladybugs in the mail last week and have some row covers on their way now. We are also trying to encourage birds & bats to take up residence in the yard. Every year with a garden is a new experience. The garden will stay this same size this year, but we are always talking about how we want to finish this space in the future.

Zuke It Out

Right before the zukes started to die off, we were pulling in extra-large fruit. We prefer to pick it smaller, but it was growing so fast that this is what we would find on the vine. The harvest we pulled in with this zuke provided enough for me to bake, pickle and share with our entire street.

Well, I can tell that these photos are from a few weeks ago when we had an abundance of zuchinni & cucumbers. In about a week, we would lose our first zuke plant and begin our battle with the squash (& other) bugs. Though, as a gardener, you never want to lose your plants; really, we have been blessed with a lot of crop so far this year. We have been able to do everything that we would have wanted as far as cooking, canning & sharing. This weekend, I processed the last of our major zucchini harvest and will use the "last" two zukes to make chocolate zuchinni bread. Darren has already planted new seedlings & seeds for a second harvest- this is the first year we have done that.

This is what the kitchen looks like when I can. I would probably be considered a fairly messy cook as you can see an abundance of utensils, spices and produce lining the countertop. On the stove are my canning pot (the big mama) and my cooking pot. Hot water bath canning is all about heat, and when I am doing a batch, I will have some sort of boiling liquid going for several hours. Thankfully, our new pocket door was just installed (not in this picture) to help keep the heat from spreading throughout the house.

It was just 2 years ago that I did my first ever canning with an apple harvest (not from our property). Looking back it seemed like such a production...and it really is...but now it is no big deal for me to head to the kitchen 2-3 times a week to do a batch of canning. This was my first year to do pickling, and I have made several different versions of bread & butter pickles, dill pickles, relish and squash salads. In the past two weeks, we started to harvest our larger tomatoes & peppers and, yesterday, I did my first batches of salsa & tomatoes. I find myself amazed at the relative simplicity of the process and exhausted by the chore of it all at once. Mostly, I just love to see all those brightly colored jars lined up on the counters with the cheerful ping of their lids punctuating my sense of satisfaction at a job well done.

My pickles!

The Vegetables of Our Labor

The above photo is from a few weeks ago, I can tell that because at that time I felt like pulling this much produce from the garden was momentous enough to take a picture. Still, it looks magazine cover perfect to me, and I will say (once again) how very proud I am of Darren and all the hard work he has done to build & grow our garden! The man is an amazing green thumb (though I might amend that to blue thumb after receiving this quarter's water bill, which is three times our usual- we have got to get our well working)!

We harvest every other evening, and the weird picture above is my own invention because sticking your arms into zucchini plants and other vegetables can be irritating work. For those of you unfamiliar, lots of viny plants are covered in a protective, spiky fuzz that somehow seems to burrow into your skin. It can scratch you up and it can also leave you itching like crazy, even hours later. I cut off a pair of Kyrie's knit pants that she'd put a hole in and used the scraps as arm protection. Darren may be the great planter & grower, but we have moved into my time of the year and I am the great harvester/preparer/cooker/canner.

We had so many bush & pole beans to pick this week, that I had to turn over a bucket so that I could sit down. Sitting there pulling beans, I could not get over how very lucky we are- my family specifically, but also most of our entire country. The fact that we have good ground and (mostly) adequate water and can grow our own food with relatively little effort is simply amazing to me. I do not understand how it is that every school yard, church yard and public park does not have a space for community gardening. Hunger is an issue in America, and anyone who has compared the prices of produce to the prices you can get going through the drive-thru at McDonald's knows that healthy food is at a premium. But with some bags of dirt and a few packets of seeds, we can grow so much. Just our garden is producing more than we can consume. We have more than enough to share with neighbors, friends & co-workers, and I am canning with the hopes to share with far-away family, too.

Here are a few photos of the large garden beds. I am ashamed to say that we have not made much use of the lettuce this year. I have given some away and we have a bag in the fridge that we have been using for sandwiches & burgers, but otherwise it just keeps growing (and some has gone to seed). I like having lettuce, but I would prefer to have spinach just because it is more versatile (our spinach seeds did not take this year). In the photo above, the wispy patch is our asparagus, which will take a few years to actually produce. Behind that we have a bed of cantaloupe. The garden is really pretty and some of the neighbors have even stopped by to take a closer look- our next door neighbor refers to Darren as "the gentleman farmer," which makes me smile.

 

Our berry bushes! The kids are huge berry eaters, so these are so good for our garden. These are blueberries and blackberries, but we also have raspberries, strawberries & currants (& mulberry trees). The berries have been trickling in, but most get eaten as soon as they ripen.

I did not photograph all of this evening's harvest, but this is a good example of what we can get in one round. The zucchini is by far our biggest producer at this point, but we have a lot of tomato & pepper plants that I know will start producing soon. After I took these photos, I went inside and blanched & froze beans, broccoli & cauliflower. The next day, I canned zucchini cobbler filling using about half of these zukes. We have yellow squash and two kinds of cucumbers that are just starting to come in now. I just canned a dozen jars of bread & butter pickles this morning.

Berry Sweet

The kids took to the yard in search of berries one warm afternoon. Degen found his little bucket and a patch of wild strawberries by the swingset to pick. He was earnest in his work and happy with his harvest, though I cannot imagine that the berries tasted very good. No matter, he popped a few in his mouth and gave appreciative murmurs of their deliciousness!

Kyrie headed back to the mulberry tress and pulled berries from one of the low branches. She did not need a bucket for collection because each ripe berry she found went straight into her mouth!

Degen made his way back to the mulberries as Kyrie headed for the garden where she found our lone ripe raspberry and promptly picked it to pluck in her mouth! That evening, Darren would find our first ripe blueberry and let her have it also. In my mind, I had visions of canned berries, but now I am unsure of how many berries will actually make it past the children!