RSS

Sunday, August 29, 2010

News from the Garden.....

Labels: at 10:37 PM

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary
How Does Your Garden Grow?

That old child's verse comes into my head whenever I talk to someone about my garden.  I love my garden.  I love planting seeds and watching them grow into plants, flower and produce food that then sustains us.  I love the beauty of the different plants as they grow - vines ever moving outward and upward, sunflowers reaching towards the heavens, tomatos and beans bushing out with little flowers everywhere.  It's poetry in motion.

And now that it is the end of August, it's a body in motion as I try to harvest everything and get it preserved and put away for the colder months!

So far this season, I have frozen about 8 quarts of broccoli, 8-10 quarts of corn (with more in the refridgerator, ready to go....just finding the time) and 1 of green beans (too hot so far for many).  I have also put down 4 quarts of raspberries and about 4 quarts of blueberries into the freezer.  I did up 16 pints of peaches (from a 1/2 bushel I bought at the farmer's market), most of those in light syrup, but a few "spirited peaches" with peach schnapps in the syrup!  I also did 11 jelly jar size (?) of sweet n' tangy BBQ sauce.  I've never done that before, but it sure does taste yummy!  We've had sauerkrat brining for about 6 weeks now...another two weeks and I'll take it out and freeze it.I had a whole pot of tomatos stewing for sauce, but ended up burning those.  That irritated me...about 30 lbs of tomatos down the drain.  (well, actually into the chicken pen, but whatever).  Remind me not to try to stew tomatos while playing video games with the kids again, okay?

The garden is still going in full swing.  It seems like almost everything is coming in at least two weeks early, despite our late planting.  My beans are finally flowering quite a bit, so I'm hoping for more of those.  The tomatos are going bonkers and taking over the entire end of the garden!  The sweet potato vines look awesome, although I haven't dug around yet to see what's under there (anyone know when to harvest them?).  Broccoli and celcery are looking good and still going strong. And our pumpkins are already turning orange....I hope they stay good till the end of October!!! 

I've planted more peas and radishes and lettuce and spinich for the fall garden.  It's been so hot this summer that we really had a hard time with the cool weather stuff that usually goes all summer for us.  I'm hoping a fall garden goes well.

And I'm hoping that Mr. CrazyLife proves good on his promise to create my cold boxes this fall.....I'd love to keep some things going through the winter!!!

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)