What's coming from your garden?

Tomatoes are coming in now so a couple of those are sliced. Cukes sliced with onion in vinegar. Green beans with butter. These will accompany wild rice and turkey breast for din-din in a half hour.

How’s everyone else’s gardens yielding?

My spinach is done and the leaf lettuce is about on its last legs….we’ve been eating lettuce at every meal for two weeks now. The potatoes have finished flowering so next week I plan to try a couple hills. Ma’s cherry tomato plant is nuts with the little dinks but I hold out for my full sized maters, of which 1 of the three I picked this morning has been mentioned for the dinner course. Man I love it when the garden starts laying out the fresh veggies. A guy doesn’t hardly need meat when the garden is rocking.

Yum! Your garden harvests sound delicious! We’ve got a bunch of tomatoes just waiting to turn red. Carrots are going to be picked and blanched in the next week. But our beans aren’t doing well. Hopefully they’re just being late bloomers.

So far we’ve picked tomatoes, green beans, spinach, kohlrabies, cilantro, green peppers, and pea pods. So far it’s been a good year.

SR

Critters got my beans early on so I re-seeded. And built a fence around the bed.

I leave the carrots in the ground until just before it freezes, the ground that is. Frost won’t hurt the tops.

My Buttercup squash, another season of run amok vines from a supposedly bush variety, is doing real well. I now have squash set in every portion of the yard/gardens within 60 feet of where I planted the damn things so I’ll have to go on another mission this fall to find the goodies. Last year one vine went up our Tamarisk tree about twenty feet and I can attest that 5 six pound squash are not good for thin branches. I planted my three hills of squash again this season. Last year the three hills provided us with 34 squash.

The potatoes are four feet tall this year and I can’t even see where the plants go in the ground. What a jungle. Last year’s potatoes were still being eaten in February of this spring….we’re going to start chewing on this years crop earlier than we did last year I know that.

My 8 standard tomato plants are all over 6 feet tall, or were until this last wind and rain. None broke but they sure did droop. I have a dozen of two different Roma variety tomatoes and those are producing now so salsa is on the near future list….maybe this weekend.

My onions didn’t do much so I’ve been plucking them to use with the cukes and to slice for hamburgers. Onions are cheap though so I think I’ll pass on them from now on.

Its fun to hear what others plant and how the gardens are providing. Carole and I are big on veggies all year so when the garden starts providing we sure enjoy it.

Most my kalarabi seen to be all stem, not bulbing out. Bummer. Mater’s are coming if I get half the green beans as I see flowers I’m going to have a pile.onions are doing good, after I get back from Vegas there getting yanked. My carrots look good to as I will start pulling them soon to start eating.

Out tomatoes don’t look so hot. Not much of a gardener, only really the second year of having one, but I sent pictures to a buddy who thought I had mites. So, I sprayed the living daylights out of them with Sevin. I cannot see any improvement.
Then, when looking around I see dead standing weeds a foot or so away. So I ask the wife if she sprayed weeds there. YEP! Not even a foot away!
Grr, so, I believe that has something to do with the leaves curling up. They are not turning brown and its mainly the top of the plant.
I watered incessantly the last several days and I cannot say they are getting worse.
There are quite a few tomatoes on them. Our jalapenos and bell peppers are looking pretty good. Heckuva pile of jalapenos.

Zucchini’s are going crazy again, lettuce was great but is pretty much done by the looks of it, Broccoli is doing well and got a few heads off of it. Tomatoes are looking good and should be producing in the next week or so, along with the Jalapeno’s. Squash and cucumber’s look good, but nothing showing yet. Pea’s and Beans are struggling and not sure if they’ll produce much. Mint, Cilantro, Dill and Basil are producing way more than we would ever use. Looking forward to some good eats in the very near future!

Cherry tomatoes are coming in thick. Just picked my first head of broccoli. I see that a deer has been in my garden eating my big boy tomatoes. My peppers have been growing slow. Planted brussel sprouts and cauliflower this year also and they are doing well but nothing to harvest yet

With a new baby in the house, our garden was put on the backburner for this season. I continued to pick weeds so I don’t have an infestation for next season, but I ran into an issue…less than 1/4 of our garden WAS strawberries…now over half are strawberries and we have done literally nothing to water, spray or protect them. They spread like weeds in fresh soil! I figured why not make the best of it and have been harvesting them weekly and cutting the runners. We now have enough strawberries to support the French army…

My beets look to be ready and I will try my first attempt at pickling them.

We’ve had a fair amount of snap peas, but they’re about done. Our raspberries have done well. We ate our first picking of beans last night–delicious! Tomatoes are doing well, but I don’t have any ripe yet. Jalapeno and bell peppers are doing okay despite the deer chewing on them several times. Carrots are looking good, and broccoli is looking good.

I have some watermelons going in pots for the kids, and those are doing really well so far, too.

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Those colorful beans look good!

We just harvested some cucumbers this week! They feel a little soft and look a little goofy this year but they’re crisp and delicious when you slice them!

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Yanked the onions yesterday. Bumper crop!

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Ralph Wiggum wrote:

I have some watermelons going in pots for the kids, and those are doing really well so far, too.

Watermelons in POTS? That paints a funny picture! How does that work? Wouldn’t the pots need to be huge? Or does the plant spread onto the ground and they grow there?

Lots of green beans. Pickled a batch this wknd. They will go well with bloody Mary’s and I’ve got several neighbors/friends (mostly girls) that like to put what ever I have for garnish in the beer fridge in their beer.

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My tomatoes aren’t doing so hot either!:???:

Billy and I spent about seven hours yesterday harvesting carrots. And here I was getting tired of the bushy carrot tops getting my way, just to dig ’em all up within a few days! It was a long evening and I’m still sore from all that work, but it’s totally worth it! 55 bags of hearty goodness filled our freezer. Here is a picture of our big 10 gallon stock pot full of chopped carrots.

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Sharon wrote:

Watermelons in POTS? That paints a funny picture! How does that work? Wouldn’t the pots need to be huge? Or does the plant spread onto the ground and they grow there?

Yes, they grow out of the pots.

3 qts pickled green beans along with a couple meals. Also blanched some for the freezer!

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Here’s one of my watermelons, the beginnings of broccoli, and some of my peppers and tomatoes!

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We’ve been enjoying fresh salsa and tonight we’ll be eating Bruschetta again, second time in a week. As I type I have a 12 quart kettle of tomatoes cooking down to sauce that I’ll freeze.

Update….the 12 quarts have been cooked with onion and garlic, water strained off, pureed, sieved, and are now down to 4 quarts. At three quarts the sauce is finished and gets put in quart jars and either capped hot or frozen.

For those who have a problem getting the juice to cook out of tomatoes for making a nice sauce, toast a couple slices of bread and simply set them out on the counter top to completely dry while the sauce is cooking. Then when the sauce “looks” ready to jar up let it set off the heat for a couple hours and you’ll find that dastardly juice back on top of the sauce. Lay the toast on top of the sauce carefully and leave for ten minutes, then very carefully lift each piece off the sauce with a spatula and discard. Lots of that juice goes bye-bye doing this and you’re way less likely to have watery sauce on your pasta.

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So far we have enjoyed asparagus, rhubarb, strawberries, radishes, raspberries, beets, onions, cilantro, basil, colirobi cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers. I love the garden, wish I had more time for it.

Few mo re goodies!

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96 quarts of dill pickles as of now. Should be upward of 200 by time I’m done. Ya good eats.

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Holy moly, you trying to put Gedney outta business?? looking good though!!

Last nite. 13 qys stewed tomatoes, 5 pints juice and 15 pints salsa.

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I just got another 12 quart pot of tomatoes on to cook down a bit, then they’ll go thru the food mill and become tomato sauce. Salsa we eat fresh. I stll have abundant canned tomatoes from last season so those aren’t in this year’s picture. I yanked a carrot the other day because I saw how wide the top was and if the rest are anything like the one I pulled I’ll need some more storage room for them. Squash are all over the place.

Num num!!

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Carrots today. Pick,clean,chop,blanch,vacuum seal, freeze. All before 5:00 or my a$$ is grass. Promised to take my wife, mother, and father out to dinner since it is all 3’s b-day this week. Wish me luck.

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47 quarts of dill pickles today. Each quart has a 1/2 Of habenero pepper in it.

Total of 95 quarts of regular dill, and now these 47 quarts of hot ones. Up to 142 quarts of pickles canned so far this summer.

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