Weird Anne: Produce

Showing posts with label Produce. Show all posts

July 17, 2009

How Does Your Garden Grow

I'm going to start participating with How Does Your Garden Grow from AHighAndNobleCalling.com every Thursday.

Yes, I know that today is Friday -- I'm late! But I had a very busy Thursday and just now getting around to doing a post. =)

Our garden has been doing really good compared to others in the area. I really though more things would have been done by now, but this area has been cooler than normal this year. (I'm not complaining!!)

For instance our tomatoes, we've only got 2 yellow and 3 red all medium sized. And only about a dozen cherry. This is one of the yellow ones -- we ate it later that night.

But on the other hand our spaghetti squash is doing great! Spaghetti squash is a winter squash but seeing how mature some of these are already I wonder if they will be ready quicker than the "book" says. dunno yet.

This part of the garden I'm not so sure about (this is the end that the tomatoes are on too). First of all towards this end all the plants seem to be stunted. Plus some of these things I've never grown or seen growing. Starting from outside to inside of the garden -- red cabbage (seems ok), eggplant (3 kinds, not sure), seedings of basil (ok), garlic (mmm?), hot peppers (got 3 so far - not good), leeks (no clue?), and then sweet peppers (not doing good at all). Beans are to the left on this picture and the first planting are doing great! (2nd planting to fill in where 1st ones didn't take - doing good)

This is our biggest watermelon. We have them trellised and they seem to be doing pretty good.

Here's the mini pumpkins, which DO NOT have small leaves (although they are mini to regular pumpkins leaves).

Here's the largest jack-o-lantern pumpkin. We have about 4 that we've found so far. We are trellising these guys too. This working pretty well, I do know that they take up way less space this way.

And here is my corn =)

I'll do the potted stuff some other time soon! This post is already too long!
Oh and I just got some more seeds in the mail today so I'll have even more garden stuff to talk about real soon =)

later...

July 8, 2009

canning

Image via Wikipedia

For the past couple of days I have been processing things for winter, either by canning it or freezing it to can when it's cooler out.

Here's what I've made so far -

cherry jelly (canned 8 half pints)
spiced blueberry jam (frozen 4 batches)
cherry jam (frozen 1 batch)
veggie relish (canned 5 half pints, 3 bowls in fridge)

I got the recipes for the last 3 from a book I received from paperbackswap. It's called Better Homes and Gardens Canning & Preserving Recipes. So far they taste great! If anyone wants a certain recipe just holler and I'll post it.

Aldi's has some more blueberries, strawberries, and cherries on sale for pretty cheap (although free is better!) so I'm sure I'll be doing more.

Plus, I still have zucchini and 2 watermelons to do something with! The only drawback is I only have 12 pint jars.

later...

July 3, 2009

picked free cherries

Image via Wikipedia

We was offered an opportunity to pick the neighbor pie cherries because they will be out of town for the next week and the cherries are ready. We did this last year through a lady of freecycle too.

Just last year realized I like Bing cherries, for the longest time I hated ALL cherries. That is because I don't like maraschino cherries. For some reason I thought all cherries tasted the same -- they don't! And now I have a deep love affair with Bing cherries

But pie cherries - I can't eat them plain! They are just too sour/tart/whatever it is. LOL! They sure do make good pies though.

We got a good icing bucket full and still have more to pick off one branch that was too high up. With these cherries we are going to make canned pie filling, freeze some, and cherry cordial liqueur.

It sure is good to get something for free (well except all the ways to preserve them!).

oh and a side note everything is fruiting like crazy! We've picked 6 zucchinis, 3 hot peppers, and a handful of tomatoes. We have fruits on everything else - YEA!

later...