Thursday, August 25, 2011

Harvesting and Preserving in Full Swing

This last couple weeks have been busy ones for gardening. My garden is doing great this year and producing an abundance of fruits and veggies. I am picking something every day. Here was our pickings today. I was shocked to see how many green beans I had. I picked an entire basket full. Looks like I will be doing some more canning this weekend! So far I have been able to put up 10 pints of beans.

The zucchini went crazy too. I haven't gotten much so far this year so I didn't check for a few days. Wrong move because I found some huge ones hiding. I will be shredding and freezing those for use in bread and brownies later.

Our cantaloupe is doing great. So far we have picked 7. I still have a few out on the vines waiting to ripen. They are wonderful! Sweet and juicy.I still have a few tomatoes coming on. The major crop is over and I was able to put up quite a few quarts of tomatoes as well as salsa.

I fell into some really cheap sweet corn and was able to put up 17 quart size bags into the freezer. After posting about canning sweet corn I read lots of replies about freezing it so thought I would give it a whirl. I don't have a lot of freezer space to spare but the corn did stack nicely and didn't seem to take up much room.Along with everything that is being produced in my garden I fell onto some free apples from a tree in my neighborhood. I have already picked one batch and plan to make another trip here soon. Applesauce, frozen apple pie and turnover packets, dehydrated apples, as well as fruit leather is on the list of things to make with those.

I also was given permission to pick a few grapes from my neighbors vines. Looking forward to possibly making some jelly with those if we don't eat them all first!

How is your garden doing? Are you busy harvesting and preserving?

This post is linked to Simple Lives Thursday at Spain in Iowa.


3 comments:

  1. Our cukes are done, out of 6 plants I got 10 cukes. Ugh! I planted 16 tomato plants and while the plants are huge and healthy - I am not getting many tomatoes. Just enough for us to eat. My second go round of beans should be producing soon. My second round of peas never sprouted. I need to plant lettuce again and I have more beets than I know what to do with, seeing as I have never eaten or cooked a beet in my life.

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  2. You're making my hungry for that corn!

    I just wanted to let you know, that our flight won't get back in time for me to be at the blogger meetup tomorrow. I can't use my email, facebook or twitter right now. long story, husband only has trail version of tether wifi for his phone. Sad to miss it!!!

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  3. PS: would you please tell Julia C? I can't get her website to load for some reason??

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