The Garden That Keeps On Giving

When we first moved here, we plotted out a garden, tilled it, fenced it in to protect it from rabbits and deer, put hay down to mulch it and planted a nice big garden. 

I had no earthly idea how it would produce, but apparently, we can *grow* a garden!


Daily, I love the walk outside to look at it just to see how pretty it is:

When you get up close, you can see the tomatoes and cucumbers:

 We started the season picking little bits of stuff.  Raelee, Steph and I eat most of the cherry tomatoes, we cut cucumbers and tomatoes for summer salads, and we cut cucumber and tomato salads, and we munch on cucumbers and tomatoes, and feed them to the kid, and to the neighbors, give 'em to the senior citizens and when no one else will take them, we give them to the chickens;

By the way, if you like cherry tomatoes, the plants to buy are sweet 100's. The produce by the thousands, the perfect, small, sweet cherry sized, yums!


As the season progresses, we get a little bit more stuff every day:

And finally, now our daily pick goes somewhat like this:

So we can our take.

We can pickles:

We can tomatoes:

We make spaghetti and lasagne sauce - and can it:

We can more pickles; jalapeno pickles, banana pepper pickles, butter pickles, zucchini pickles, hamburger pickles;

We can peaches, peach butter, and peach jelly;

And we can more pickles;

We soak cukes and guess what?  We can more pickles!

 
And just in case we didn't have enough pickles, we make refrigerator pickles!

And then we go to the garden and what do we find?  MORE CUCUMBERS!  And look how BIG those babies are!

SO we go back to canning pickles:

And as we do, we look on our shelves and think, "Man we have pretty jars of good yummy food to get us through the winter, but we don't have quite enough yet, so let's grow our garden some more!"

And can we ever grow a garden!

We have a garden that keeps giving and giving.

We have many more days of canning those goodies and stock piling them away.

Winter is gonna taste like summer!

I am off to the farmer's market - they might have more goodies to can!