Harvest

Gary did most of the work on the garden, but he gave me responsibility for the plants he doesn't usually plant that I wanted, beets and carrots. And a raised bed that we filled with marigolds.  Also I put in and took care of a whole bed of azaleas, peonies, and nasturtiums after we took out an invasive plant which had taken over the bed.

Here is the vegetable garden.

I would like to list the things we harvested and preserved.  Gary made jam, from tayberries in his garden, as well as blackberries that we picked.  There are as many berries as anyone could pick on land near the dump, owned by the dump.  I discovered I like blackberries even more than blueberries in my smoothies, so I picked enthusiasticly and we froze as many as we could.

We had a good onion harvest.  We let them dry and then bagged them up.

Gary made pickled green beans and pickled beets.  I helped a little.

We got some nice pumpkins, and squash.

Peppers, the excess of which we froze.

Lots of apples - for applesauce and we also dried some.

Wild plums, which Gary is making into cordial.  The little ones are wild, bigger is from his tree.

The biggest crop was tomatoes. We had bucket after bucket after bucket after bucket of them. We gave quite a few away, but still had many. At first Gary and I worked together to freeze them.  He like to blanch and peel them, then freeze whole.  Then he went on a trip, and I needed to do something with the many more we had.  I made the rest into soup or sauce and froze.  It really was incredible how productive his 35 plants were, kept us very busy.  It will be well worth it in the winter to have so many tomatoes for soups, sauces, chili, whatever we're cooking.

Gary made jalapeno jelly.  We coughed for several hours after he chopped them up in the blender - amazing how something from them can permeate the air.

We had quite a few eggplants, and I experimented with slicing, salting, patting dry, and freezing.  We'll see how that goes.  We also had basil, and Gary made and froze pesto.  And we had a good harvest of green beans - blanched and frozen.  Gary did get a second freezer because we're purchasing beef from a neighbor.

Planting the garden, harvesting, and preserving is Gary's favorite thing to do, next to bowling.  I really enjoyed it, too.

Here is my nasturtium bed, which maybe counts since nasturtiums are edible?