Even though I haven’t been updating much about it, our garden has kept us busy through the summer and into the fall so far. (See what we planted here.) We’ve had many days where we sent Jonah out to go “shopping” and he returned with a bowl full of good stuff!
Even though we only planted one cucumber plant, it took off! We’ve gotten more cucumbers than we could keep up with some weeks.
We’ve also gotten enough tomatoes that I was able to try my hand at canning them for the first time. While we ate most of them fresh (or turned into sauce or soup that we ate right away), I still have 3 quart jars of diced tomatoes to enjoy later on.
It’s also rained so much that we had to harvest our potatoes a little bit earlier than we had planned so they wouldn’t rot in the ground, but they were massive! We ended up with almost 30 pounds, which was helpful, because our family usually goes through about 20 pounds in a month.
Our butternut squash have taken over almost half of the garden by now, and started to climb through and over the fence, which still amazes me, since we started with one tiny plant. We plan on harvesting them before we move so we can take them with us.
The grapevine did really well this year, and Jesse and the kids have tried a few of the grapes already. They’re seeded, and I don’t really know what to do with them, other than eat them. Any suggestions for something quick and easy I could manage before we leave?
Our apple trees were actually really disappointing this year. Most of the apples grew like the picture above, with one right on top of the other. That meant that at least one if not both rotted on the tree. Combined with the crows and the bugs, we don’t have very many edible apples left. I don’t know if I’ll have time to harvest these, but if I do, I’ll probably can them into applesauce before we go.
Here’s what the garden looked like as of last week. Because of all the rain, the weeds are thriving. We weeded the whole thing at least twice, with some additional weeding in some spots. But after awhile, the plants were tall enough that we just let it go.
Measuring by pounds, we beat last year, and we haven’t even weighed the butternuts yet! Here’s what we got:
- Strawberries: 5.35 oz.
- Peas: 1 oz. (these got mostly eaten by bunnies before we got our fence up)
- Raspberries: 2.2 lbs. (we ate these for snacks and made jam)
- Cucumbers: 22.2 lbs. (we ate these in salads, made refrigerator pickles, and I canned 3 jars of pickles as well)
- Yellow cherry tomatoes: 4.65 lbs. (the kids mostly snacked on these, but I made Sausage Eggplant Pasta a few times too)
- Roma tomatoes: 19.17 lbs.
- Beefsteak tomatoes: 19.88 lbs.
- Green peppers: 3.03 lbs.
- Jalapeno peppers: 13.4 oz. (I made pretty much all of these into Jalapeno Poppers for snacks)
- Potatoes: 28.71 lbs.
- Acorn squash: 1.48 lbs. (this grew in the compost!)
- Butternut squash: not weighed yet, but there’s at least 10 good-sized squash out there plus several baby ones
All in all, not a bad harvest! Did you grow anything this year?
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