Seeds to Shelves

                                          SEEDS TO SHELVES.......AND MORE

I found out this spring that I needed rotator cuff surgery and would have the summer off. It may sound good to people but you are very limited, at least at first, in what you can do because you have one arm. I decided that I would take advantage of summer and dive into my garden. And dive in, I did!



                                                     AND SO IT BEGINS WITH SEEDS

I had already planned to have a garden and with the help of my husband, BDWoo, we managed to add a few more raised beds. We both placed the screws and we both shoveled the dirt that we had delivered since our yard is red clay. We both pulled up fence and we both went to get compost. A joint effort. He had a tiny bit more muscle than me but I did my best.

You will see picture of the beds later on. We started three years ago with just two and have added more each year.  BDWoo built everything out of lumber, screws, fence, and whatever else we had  here already. We were big on repurposing and it was a good way to use up lots of the stuff we had laying around here.

I used to go to stores to buy my seedlings and this past spring I decided I wanted to start my own.  I like a few places to get seeds in particular. I like the heirloom and non-GMO and organics. I have had luck the past two years with these companies and will probably stick to them.

We don't really have any great sunny spot in my house so BDWoo found me a spot in the basement and set up a grow room. I think it was supposed to be a closet at one time but was never used. I was pretty happy to have my own spot.  I started a number of different kinds of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, eggplant, and flowers. My room was smaller than the amount of plants I wanted but I made it work.  It was actually pretty fulfilling to see them all grow!

 

I used Fox Farm potting soil and fertilizers. They contain the nitrogen and potassium and other chemicals needed for good growth but they are organic. Earth worm castings and bat guano and the likes.  It is pretty easy at first because you leave the lights on all the time. Then later you have to turn them off at night and make sure they are watered. The plastic wrap you see is to keep them from drying out. Kind of like a little terrarium.  Eventually you transfer them to bigger containers and sometimes even a third transfer before going into the garden.  I think doing the stairs to the basement is also good for your body and you can multitask by taking laundry with you......oh yeah, don't carry clothes downstairs without a laundry basket. Learned that the hard way as well.

Eventually  they didn't fit into our grow room so we had to bring them upstairs and start taking them outside for sunshine each day. It was honestly the biggest pain of all. We loaded them into plastic tubs to carry them.

. This process is called hardening off. It helps acclimate the plants to real sunshine and chillier temperatures so they can survive. Kind of takes control of the place though!

I also added a toad house made from an old flower pot. Leave partly covered for shelter and keep water in the dish. Toads are great for your garden! They eat slugs, tent caterpillars, and other bugs. I have two toad houses. Not sure if they got used but I did see toads around and it made me happy. There are other creatures that you actually WANT there, like spiders, ladybugs,  and praying mantises. They eat bad bugs. The mantises can eat the good ones too so watch out for that.. You can order insects to help in your garden but you might get a variety that is not indigenous to your area and I try to avoid introducing things like that into my garden.

Next I planted some things from seed. Lettuce, kale, radish, green beans, snap peas, squashes , melons, and pumpkins grow just fine from seed. Other plants will grow from seed as well but they produce faster if started indoors. Root vegetables can be planted around Good Friday ( carrots, radishes, potatoes, etc) Then around Mother's Day you can start planting your seedlings. Note the white plastic spoon on the left. You will see them throughout the garden with the names of the plants I am growing. Helps you to remember what is there before it sprouts and what the actual name of the plant is in case you want to delete it next year or grow it again. There is also a hand painted stepping stone from the grandkids to jazz things up!

In our first year of gardening we had two raised beds and were pretty happy with tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and a zucchini. Each year we have added beds and plants. we are up to eleven raised beds and I would like to add an herb area next year. Seems crazy not to grow all of my own herbs since I can and freeze the food from my garden! Next year....

I can see BDWoo in the doorway checking me out lol. I kind of get lost out here sometimes. We have a lot of stuff laying about so just ignore it or get used to it... :) You will also notice cardboard around the beds. It helps to keep out the weeds since the mower wont fit in between all of the beds. Still not sure about what we will use here for mulch. I hear good and bad about wood chips and pea gravel and other things.  For now it is a bit unsightly but it does the job. Also worms love cardboard so it keeps them circulating around under the ground.


I had straw covering raspberry plants and gladiola bulbs  from winter and all of a sudden I got this little surprise! HYACINTHS! I love hyacinths and had forgotten that I planted them last fall. It was nice to have something unexpected show up and they smell wonderful. This fall I will move the bulbs to the blueberry bed where they will grow well. They are so pretty in a vase in your house too.

I also had some containers of potatoes this year. I think my soil had a little too much clay in it because they didn't actually grow very well. I will do something different next year for sure and have a little fluffier soil. I did get my first pests of the year with them though. Black beetles were chomping on the leaves. I sprayed them with Neem oil (organic) and they were fine again.

I finally had the surgery at the end of may. Luckily I had most of the stuff planted that needed to go in. For a week or so I did nothing but sit around and watch TV and read. Thanks to my friend Renea, I had a borrowed Kindle and it saved me from going crazy.

Eventually I could be outside and I spent almost every day walking around in the garden pulling weeds. If you have all the time in the world, your garden will be weed free. I only needed one hand to do it. I listened to podcasts on my phone and audio books from the library and just hung outside every morning.

I also joined a couple of facebook groups on gardening and canning. I learned soooo much from people who had the experiences, both good and bad. I definitely took advantage of being stuck in a chair for lots of the day.  You can learn something new all of the time.



                                                                TIME TO HARVEST


So the first things that can be harvested are usually lettuce, kale, onions and radishes. We learned to eat kale. I  froze it,  made kale chips, sauteed it, chopped it in all kinds of sauces and side dishes,  gave it away, and even sold it to a local restaurant.  I grew some Cherry Belle radishes as a pest deterrant but nobody eats them except me and I can live without them so I left most of them in the ground near squash and pumpkins.

My son, Craig whipped me up a fantastic breakfast with kale and veggies when he was here as well. This is his typical breakfast at his place and he BUYS the kale. Oh i wish I could have mailed it to him. But doesn't this look like something you would love to eat? It was dee-lish. The stuff grows fast and crazy.

The cabbage moths like to chew on kale a bit but cant do much damage because I definitely over planted the stuff! It was like the swiss chard experience all over again for those of you who know how swiss chard grows. If you cut it often and take care of it, It will grow until it snows. It is very healthy for you so eat some!

Baby kale...this much is NOT necessary!

Early kale...(butter crunch lettuce on the left..yummy)

To this.... RIDICULOUS unless you and your friends and family eat a ton of it each day!
Okay, enough of kale. whew.......I have only three small plants left. Chopped the rest out of there!


My onions didn't do very well. I bought them from a local feed store trying to give them my business, but it didn't pan out well. Come to think of it, that's where I also bought my seed potatoes, too......hmmmmm. I did get about two dozen and my friend Tina gave me some from her stash so I did have some onions but not enough to store, which was my goal. Oh well....next year.


I had quite a few downers in the garden this year which was disappointing but that's how you learn. I had a beautiful zucchini plant and was so proud of it!!!! It had a corner lot and used up a lot of room there. It was just magnificent!

  

                                             Then in just a day's time it went to this:

Talk about depressing.....I had joined a gardening fb page and they all told me it was the dreaded Vine Borer. I actually saw the little bastard laying her eggs on the squash and pumpkins after I knew what to look for. She is hideous and impossible to catch or kill. If the eggs hatch, the larvae crawl down to the base and bore inside of the vine, hence the name vine borer.

EEEW, right??? So you have to inject  and spray the vines with caterpillar killer (organic) and
every day walk out with duct tape on your hands and pull the tiny eggs off. Let me tell you it is almost impossible. they come back every day. And then they reproduce and their kids come back every day. Grrr.

So here was my big zucchini harvest:

Yep, 1 beautiful zucchini. I did go out and grab a couple of tiny ones before it finally died on me. I didn't know about the caterpillar  killer in time.  But, hey!!! the same thing happened to my gorgeous spaghetti squash!  Now I knew what to do!

So I injected and sprayed with Safer brand caterpillar ( organic) and still ended up losing my two squash plants but I did manage to keep them alive long enough to harvest some fruit.  They don't ripen very well of the vine but I left them in the sun for a few weeks until the skins were hard and golden and the stems were brown. Spaghetti squash will store well for a few months if you keep it inside and in a dry place.

So after chopping down the zucchini and spaghetti squash I decided not to let the perfectly good real estate go to waste and I planted sugar snap peas in the zucchini spot and more beets and lettuce in the spaghetti spots! The sugar snap peas are delicious right off the vine as well as cooked. You can eat the peas and you can eat the pods. both are sweet. I will freeze this crop of them. you don't have to blanch them so it will be pretty easy.

I was given a couple of frogs for my garden but our dog, Bo has a thing for the rubbery one Shawn sent to me. I finally had to put it up high on the pea trellis. If you zoom in  you will see it up there! He never put a hole in it but kept stealing it and hiding it from me. Once he pulled it out of the grass near our pool filter. Hmmmm, I don't remember putting it there!

Butter crunch lettuce will turn into heads if you let it grow but I harvest it and eat it when it is still in leaf form. It has a similar look to romaine lettuce but a nicer flavor, I think. I most recently planted some tennis ball lettuce which grows in small heads. we shall see how that goes. the butter crunch is on the left in this picture.

So beets are another one of the first crops to harvest, eat and preserve. Personally, I do NOT like beets! They taste like dirt to me. That being said, everyone else in the family seems to like pickled beets so I grow them and pickle them and they eat them. I do wish I liked them because they are pretty lol. There aren't many things that I don't like to eat but I actually grow a few of them anyway since the family enjoys them.  If you like beets you will also like the beet greens ( and purples as you can see in the picture above!) either raw in salads or sauteed. Swiss chard is in the beet family as well, so if you like beets, grab some swiss chard.  They are both very healthy eating.

Here's the link to the recipe I use and everyone seems to love:

http://www.food.com/recipe/pickled-beets-31560

The next things that really seems to show up are bush-style beans and cucumbers. I am not a fan of green beans but the others like them and so does our dog. I actually like them raw though, and that is usually how I eat them.Right off the bush too. Granddaughter, Aylah wanted her own garden this year and bush beans were one of the choices. You pick a bunch every day or two.  The green beans are in the center of the garden.

I don't can green beans, I freeze them. Our  bush beans are string-less so all you have to do is throw them into boiling water for 3 minutes, then into cold water for the same. I freeze them lined up on a cookie sheet for about 30 minutes and toss them into a  freezer bag. I just keep adding them until the bag is full.   Try to get as much of the air out as you can to keep the flavor in. Blanching keeps the colors and nutrients in your produce when you are going to freeze them.

I also grew some pole beans..Carolina tar Heel. but they ween't as tasty and they have strings that you have to remove before preparing them. I will say that they are easy to pick and take up less room so maybe I will look for a different variety and do this again. Anything you can grow vertically saves ton of room for something else. Btw the trellises were re-purposed from screen rooms that went bad and these were in the corners. As usual my husband kept them and I complained about it.  As usual, we also found a use for them.

THE CUKES

Cucumbers  are another easy crop that is also very prolific. I grew three kinds of cucumbers this year; Boston Pickling, English Cucumber and Burpless. I had the pickling cuke on trellises and the English cukes grew along the fence around the garden. The burpless grew on the ground in the garden...and in the walkways. Always trellis your cukes if you can, or have them grow on a fence. They are easier to see and to pick. 

 Aylah's garden also has a pickling cucumber plant and pumpkin as well as bee-attracting flowers to increase pollination. Grandpa Woo made her a hoop trellis, which gave her plenty of growing space and they were easy to pick. One handed or not, I could do that!

You can pick cucumbers every day or every two days. we had tons of plants (too many...note to self) so I picked cucumbers every day. Our Island is a catch all for us so look past the milk jug where I mixed my Neem oil hee hee.

So...lots and lots of pickles. About four kinds of dill pickles, sweet gherkins, kosher dills, Korean dills, bread and butter, refrigerator bread and butter, Claussen copycats, sweet relish, golden relish. I canned sooo many pickles and relishes. I also gave away cucumbers to my friend Elynn, and traded cucumbers with someone else for hot peppers that I didn't grow. 

Also ate lots of cucumber salads and make cucumber dressing. Here's the recipe I used:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/117797346482324751/

I would like to post all of the recipes but there are so many that it would take up the whole blog. I will post the pics though..sorry!!

 
the pickles on the top left are a Claussen copycat recipe. They are as good as Claussen pickles, which are a refrigerator pickle so you do not have to use a processer. they are wonderful and easy and cheap.                                                   Make your own; you won't be sorry!

                 http://flavorite.net/2015/03/03/copycat-claussen-kosher-dill-pickles/

The Korean pickles have a lot of green onion and garlic, along with fresh ginger and red peppers. delish! You have to like spicy and garlic though! It is a refrigertor pickle so you dont't have to worry about canning them. This was my first experience with fresh ginger. Easy! You just keep it in the freezer and grate t as you need it.

http://jeanetteshealthyliving.com/spicy-korean-cucumber-kimchi-refrigerator-pickles/

Sweet gherkins are yummy but need to be soaked in salt over a couple of days..but worth it!  They are also pretty expensive to buy so if you like them you might want to make them yourself!

The recipe can be found in the Ball recipes website or Ball canning books. You can download a pdf for many recipes and I will refer to this many times.  It is the canning Bible!

I also made two kinds of sweet pickle relish and the recipes are in the Ball book. This is the one most people recognize. I will never buy it again. It is way too easy to make!

I make a lot of bread and butter pickles because my mom made them. Our family loves them. Lots of people don't care for them. I think it depends what you are used to. 

So I get pretty caught up in canning and my kitchen is small. I found this when looking for a plastic container....my dog likes Cukes so I put some leftovers away for him in the fridge, or so I thought. Need to take my time I think; check out the lower right of this pic:

Oops.....sometimes they hide in all of the greenery and then when you find them they look like this!

Now you scoop out the seeds, peel it, and make cucumber salsa.

I also dehydrated cucumber chips. They are actually tasty and sweet and you don't feel guilty eating them. I have an actual dehydrator but I did these in the oven with a little bit of olive oil on a cookie sheet to make them crisp. Wish I had made more to store away. Next year.....

In the beginning I had to have Danielle help me slice and chop veggies. Then BDWoo  helped. Eventually I could do it even with my sling and cucumbers are pretty easy. My physical therapist said it would actually be good to help start my muscles moving.  I couldn't pick up pots of water and I had to pick up the jars with my left hand but it was very do-able.

I also grew a little sweetheart called a cucamelon, or mexican gherkin. It is a tiny cucumber that has a little twist of lime in the taste. It looks like a little watermelon and is flat out adorable. It grows on vines like a cucumber and is pretty prolific once it gets started. it comes on later in the season with fruit. I wish that I had put these on a trellis because they are hard to find in all the vines! You can eat them raw or pickle them in the fridge but they don't hold up very well to can them.

 I wish I could say that these came from my property, but I bought eggs and pickled them. They are definitely an acquired taste but if you like them you will like these and they are easy to make. Need refrigeration though. I also think that the next time I make them I will add a lot more heat so they are spicier.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/59461657558927370/

I had another kind of a miniature crop this year as well. They were fairy tale eggplant. The big ones get to be about 4 inches long.  They are very pretty and adorable but I guess we are just not eggplant eaters. I gave some to my physical therapist and them pulled them to make room for something else.

Here's the pics of my miniature crops. The fairy tale eggplant, cucamelons and cherry tomatoes:

 I grew a small amount of carrots in with the tomatoes just to use the space and just pulled them. i blanched them and tossed them into a freezer bag to use later. I also planted another crop. So later in the fall they will be ready; they can take the cold weather.  The greens are also good for you and have lots of vitamins. I can't really eat them. They taste like carrots.  I will send these to the compost but I think my next batch will either go into a veggie soup base or dehydrated and powdered to use later. This crop was Napoli carrots and they were short. The second crop is Nantes and they are a little larger.

Something else I planted plenty of was Italian basil. It is a good crop to plant near tomatoes so I did. I had six...yes six basil plants. I did give one plant to my friend Scott and hopefully he is getting lots of use from it. I want to tell you that basil was like kale for me lol. I blanched it and froze leaves. I put it in ice cubes with olive oil. I made tons of pesto and froze it in small batches. I gave big bouquets of it to friends. I made compound butter with it.I was going to dehydrate it...and still might... but I know that it is one of the herbs that loses flavor when dried so I froze a bunch. yep, I will probably dehydrate some so it won't go to waste and everyone uses basil so I can give it to friends too. Some of my plants are almost two feet tall now as the season ends. It is one of those plants that continues to bloom as you harvest. If you don't cut it, it eventually flowers and goes to seed.

When freezing it you need to blanch it quickly and dry it off. Then lay on parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Put into freezer for 20 min, peel off and into a freezer bag. Easy. a pain but it works. Basil is wonderful in Italian dishes and sauces and this will be as good as fresh basil and I won't have to buy it in the store, which is expensive.

I also made dried basil. I have a dehydrator but I didn't use it. I learned on a podcast to put the leaves on a cookie sheet and put them in the car in the sun with the windows closed. It was done in a day and I didn't have to run the dehydrator for hours on end. They crush easily with your fingers.  dried basil doesn't have a ton of flavor compared to fresh but definitely has a spot in the cupboard. And again, it was free. I wouldn't try it in the oven because it is too delicate.

I also made a lot of compound butter. 2 sticks butter, somewhat softened, 3/4 cup chopped basil leaves,, garlic salt to taste. mix all, refrigerate until solid again. Then use a scoop or tablespoon or whatever size utensil you like.  Place each scoop onto a cookie sheet and freeze for 20 min or so. Remove and put into freezer bags. You can use the to sautee vegetables, put on potatoes, mix into pasta, or whatever sounds good to you. Easy and handy in your freezer.

 Basil is also famous for use in pesto, which can go into any salad, pasta, spread onto Italian and french breads. So easy and delicious. I freeze it in small containers and take it out when we need it.

 http://littlespicejar.com/homemade-basil-pesto/

I didn't grow this cabbage myself but I did buy it locally from our farmer's market. I decided to give sauerkraut another try. I did it last year but took the advice of someone and added the spice cardamom. Did NOT like it at all. This year I just used the regular recipe of 5 lbs  shredded cabbage and   pickling salt.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/AWVsgfKp_qkaUmpC9sFlo5clH6R4XSAcTGo8GF4ZVmg9OnHZ-wIW5kc/

TOMATO SEASON

I grew four kinds of tomatoes this year. Believe me, all tomatoes are not the same.  One thing they all have in common is that they need to be staked or caged or trellised, or a combination of any of those three. Since I started mine inside they were pretty good sized seedlings when I finally got them into the ground.  They also started producing fairly early as well. I did add some more fertilizer to them when I planted them. Overall I was pretty happy with them all.

I planted an old time heirloom tomato called Black Krim. They have a green color on the top and then red on the bottom. They are not all shaped the same and are not all of the same size but that is another trait of an heirloom tomato. They have a rich taste and are delicious.

I also had Celebrity tomatoes, which are round and a small to medium tomato. I liked that it was meaty but it didn't have much flavor so I will cross it off my list for next year. Just wasn't that impressed. 

I planted San Marzano tomatoes again but only one plant. I had trouble last year with them and ended having to pull them up because they are very susceptible to disease. They are very prolific though and produced tons for me. They are great for sauces and aren't super watery inside.

The last was the Cherry Bomb. I planted two of these which is one too many and I should have known better. But they are sweet and tasty and we eat them from the vine and have a bowl on the table most of the time.  If you like cherry tomatoes, these are good. They grow very tall on a trellis though, and also branch out everywhere and pretty much take over like a giant weed. Probably grew 6 feet tall.  I pruned the sooo much and they still kept growing and filling in my walkways!  CRAZY.

My friend, Ric from NJ was traveling in the area with her husband this summer. We met for breakfast and then came back to my house and toured the garden. She reminded me about Jersey tomatoes and a few days later, I had seeds arrive in the mail! I will definitely plant some next year.

So, tomatoes....Tomato sauce, tomato juice, Italian seasoned tomatoes, Mexican seasoned tomatoes, pickled cherry tomatoes, red salsa, green salsa, hot salsa, roasted cherry tomatoes, tomato jam, ketchup. Crazy lots of stuff you can make. Most of my recipes for tomatoes are pretty much from the Ball canning book.  But the first thing I made was a recipe from my friend Peggy. It was a pasta sauce that she used on a lasagna that she gave to us while I was not able to cook and BDWoo could heat up.  We loved it.

I did put up lots of tomatoes just to use in recipes. I added Italian and Mexican spice blends to some jars so it is easy to grab them and use specifically for chili or pasta or chicken  dishes and not worry about dragging out a handful of spice jars.  It is pretty typical for the tomatoes to separate from the liquid but it all blends together when you pour it out.

I made a bunch of salsa, the Ball salsa being the best tasting for me. You can make them hot or not, whatever works for your own taste.  I also made green salsa, or salsa verde. Usually it is made with tomatillos but you can use green tomatoes as well. Why would you do that?? Well a lot of times green tomatoes fall to the ground. If they fall before they have turned even a tiny bit red, they won't ripen very easily. Can't bring myself to waste anything, so salsa verde it is. At the end of the season right before the fist frost you have to use them up too or they will be ruined. You can wrap them in newspaper to ripen them but I haven't done it yet. I may try it this fall.   You can also cut them and bread them and make fried green tomatoes.

Once in awhile something freaky happens like there is a small crack in the jar. It usually is a clean crack but you lose whatever is in the jar and then have to get new water in the canner......BDWoo back to work again for me haha.  They use a lot of water.

I tried my hand at ketchup, using the Ball recipe. It really did taste quite good, but you have to use a ton of tomatoes and cook them down for a very long time to get the consistency. Hubby liked it so it passed the test. I am still not sure if I will do it again. Maybe if I have a bumper crop next year. I got three pints this time though.

Like I said before, there is so much going on it is easy to get side tracked. you have to take your time and pay attention....or this could possibly happen. It is the funnel to pour things into the jars.  Luckily they are inexpensive!  It was still pretty bad though because I couldn't do any hard scrubbing due to my shoulder surgery. I did a little and BDWoo did the most of it. Stainless steel survives.

Cherry tomatoes can be pickled in the fridge or canned. Personally I think they get too mushy so if I pickle them I do the green ones. You can blend them into salsa when you open them. I did one jar of refrigerator pickled tomatoes.  Meh. 

 My favorite thing to do with cherry tomatoes besides eating them like grapes is dehydrating them. I didn't use the dehydrator again. (wonder why I have one!)  Cut them in half, coat them lightly with olive oil and lay them on a cookie sheet. Sprinkle with dried basil, dried oregano , freshly ground pepper and garlic salt. Bake or a few hours at 200 degrees. if you let them go until crispy at the edges they are sweet. You can bake them for less time if you wish. Whatever the done-ness for you, remove them, freeze on cookie sheet for 20 min, then scrape them off into a freezer bag. They are great in pasta salads, sandwiches, and warm pasta.

The last thing I made was tomato jam. The first thing you will think is..eeew! It is pretty much tomatoes, sugar, cinnamon and lemon juice. I usually use my mom's recipe which was also my grandmother's, but I tried a new one just for the heck of it. It had a little more kick to it but was also good. 

http://foodinjars.com/2010/09/tomato-jam/

PEPPERS

I love peppers. All kinds. I grew three kinds this year; Sweet Red, California Wonder, and Anaheim.  I learned a lot about peppers. Started them inside and put them out as seedlings.  this picture was taken in late June. They are on both sides of the walkway.

I didn't realize that all peppers start out green and then turn to whatever color they are supposed to end up! These are in various stages of turning. I also learned that a pepper is good to eat at any stage, just like cucumbers.  If you want to save the seeds and grow them next year, you must wait until it has fully ripened and turned color.

This is how they look if you wait long enough! Pretty, right??

I cored peppers and froze them whole to make stuff peppers later, I chopped them into small pieces and froze on a cookie sheet, then into a freezer bag, I roasted the Aneheims in the oven and froze them for later use in any recipes calling for chile peppers instead of paying a bunch of money for those little cans! (they're the long ones and are a little hot, but not too bad and I roasted and froze them while green).  I left the skins on the roasted peppers; they will come off easily when I take them out to thaw.

I also canned marinated red and green peppers for steaks and sandwiches.

I was wishing that I had planted a jalapeno plant. Not sure why I didn't but I did buy some at the farmer's market. I made cowboy candy, which is just candied jalapenos. LOVED it! I will definitely make more next year. you can serve it on cream cheese, like jalapeno jam. Sweet but spicy! Note to self...plant jalapenos next year.

Here is the recipe that someone screenshotted to me.

Anyone that knows me knows I won't waste food, so with the leftover peppers I made jalapeno poppers and then diced up the parts around the stems to throw into something later. They are in the freezer now.

I had tons of cucumbers so I traded a local guy for some hot peppers. I am not sure if they were serrano or cayenne but they were HOT!  I bought some sweet red cherry peppers and combined them to make  a relish. If the power goes down we have plenty of cukes and hot peppers lol.

The last thing I made was a roasted red pepper spread.  It is a Ball canning recipe that you can spread on Italian or french bread with pasta or alone. Yum. Remove skins after roasting for this before you make it.  It is on the left.

MELONS AND PUMPKINS

BDWoo wanted watermelons and I wanted pumpkins so I planted both. I put them behind the garden so they could spray and did they ever!! Howden pumpkins, which are Jack O'lanterns and also some Winter Luxury pie pumpkins, which are much smaller. I didn't realize just how prolific they are.  I also didn't realize that they start out green as well and then turn to orange.  They have gorgeous flowers on them which open during the day for pollinating and then close at night. If they are pollinated they close and form a pumpkin.

The pumpkin patch was pretty big!

It's a good idea to put cardboard or something under the pumpkins to keep the moisture of the grass off of them You can see it on the left where the pumpkin is starting to turn color.

 

Here's a pretty good sized watermelon and a sugar baby watermelon right behind it!

The pie pumpkins are smaller and some of them hopped right up onto the fence surrounding the garden where my granddaughter's plot is. Pretty cool!

Unfortunately pumpkins are part of the squash family so the vine borer as well as the squash bugs got to them no matter what I did.  Pumpkins plant themselves into the ground though so they can withstand them better and you have a chance to save the fruit. We have a total of about 27 pumpkins I think.The leaves also get what is called powdery mildew and they turn white and eventually the vines start dying away and I started cutting them back. Luckily it doesn't affect the fruit.

The pie pumpkins will be cooked and pureed and frozen for pies and bars, etc. Dogs can eat pumpkin too so I am sure Bo will get some as well!

Bake the pumpkins whole, scrape the meat out, blend it smooth, into freezer containers. Easy Peasy!

         

 

So for as well as the pumpkins grew there was one big problem; it completely took over the area where I had the watermelons. We had Charleston Grey, which are the long, light green ones and Sugar baby, which are dark and round. There were so many huge pumpkin leaves and vines that they pretty much choked the watermelons out and we only have one Charleston Grey and two Sugar Baby. Kind of a bummer. Next year I will keep them separate. Hopefully there will be more growth of these three since there is still a little time left in the season.  

FRUITS AND  BERRIES

We had a ton more fruit than anticipated this year. We had red raspberries from last year and also red raspberries from friends, Brad and Cindy. I seriously picked a bowl of them every day. Rinsed them, froze them on a cookie sheet, and pulled them out later for jam.

 Raspberries grow very tall on canes and tend to take over the area. you have to keep cutting away new ones and then one day it is just a jungle. they have some thorns but not bad. We will cut them to the ground when they have finished producing and then they will grow again in spring.

They are delicious though and worth it. Ours bear fruit in summer and again in fall.

I made low sugar raspberry jam, raspberry pepper jam with a little kick of hot, and some           chocolate raspberry sundae topping...recipe in Ball canning book or site.

I made two kinds of  raspberry pepper jam; one with jalapenos and one with anaheims so they will have different degrees of heat.

The low sugar jam is on the right. I have made all of my jams with low sugar pectin so that you can actually taste more of the berries rather than sugar. Plus, it is better for you!

We planted black raspberries this year, which are BDWoo's favorite. You don't get harvest of berries from year one though. I think I picked 5 berries. they grew like gangbusters though and I think we will have a lot next year.

We have a big strawberry patch also. It produce lots of berries but they were small. I have figured out that the sons of guns just spread so quickly that they take root and then there are not enough nutrients for all of them. We are deciding whether to thin them out another time or just go with a different variety.

We ate the strawberries in shakes, on cereal, and made Strawberry Lemonade jam.  It was a little lemony for me but still pretty good. No pectin and low sugar.