Oh my, what a difference a year makes! Last year, with the drought, we had nothing in our garden. (We planted one, and we tried to water it, but we ran our well dry for a few hours. Since that is also the water for our cows and our house, we decided the garden wasn’t that important.)
This year? Oh my, what a bounty!
The zucchini and yellow squashes are still going strong. The butternut squashes are invading the zucchini. (Remind me that next year we need to give the butternuts more room to spread out.)
Unfortunately, most of our butternut plants are starting to wilt and die. We aren’t sure what has gone wrong here…
There are still some parts that are doing well, and a squash or two that looks like they might make it to maturity… I sure hope so, I was counting on stashing some butternut squash soup in my freezer for this winter!
Yellow squash? No problem there!
We also have some spaghetti squash that are doing quite well.
Our tomatoes haven’t started to come ripe yet, but when they do, we’ll be rolling in tomatoes! Holy moly! We’ll can salsa, pizza and pasta sauce, and chili base. And it looks like we will still have plenty to can some plain diced tomatoes, too.
The yellow pear tomatoes just barely started coming ripe this week. I am really excited for these – they have a really mild flavor and make for great snacks!
Banana peppers… these guys are prolific! We’re going to be trying our hands at Mouse in My Pocket’s sweet pickled peppers recipe to put some of these up for later.
The cantaloupes are still trying to take over the world. Now they are doing it with leaves, flowers, and fruits!
The cucumbers have taken to their fence. It’s not so much a fence now as a wall…
We tried some of these round, yellow cucumbers this year (in addition to plenty of “regular” cucumbers). I have no idea what they are called. I found the seed packet in Rural King and thought they looked cute. It tastes a little sweeter than a regular cucumber, but there are tons of seeds in the middle. It would be pretty as a garnish or a side dish, but won’t make very good pickles.
If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter, you probably saw that we canned 32 quarts of green beans over the weekend. I did not expect the beans to come on quite so quickly, or so strong! We aren’t close to finished with green beans… these are still out there, waiting to be picked! And there are plenty more flowers just waiting to become beans!
Our sweet corn looks great this year, and is going to start being ready in the next week or two. We’ll be giving Beyer Beware’s freezer corn recipe a try to deal with all of this!
The pumpkin patch is going great. The plants are just getting ready to flower, and I’m hoping to have plenty of pumpkins this fall for decoration and for eating!
What is your favorite way to cook with summer produce? I’m always looking for new ideas! How do you store your extras?
Be sure to can plenty this year just in case of drought next year and in case baby boy has you busy!