This year was the first for Brad and I to have a garden--benefit of renting your in law's home while they are away--and while I absolutely HATED the prep work to plant--both Brad and I have really enjoyed watching our little plants grow, produce, and feed our bellies!
Our intent for the garden was to be able to can salsa, but our tomatoes have seemed to have had a tough time ripening enough at once to do so, so we have been enjoying fresh salsa throughout the summer and it has been delicious! We planted the tomatoes, onions (next year will be better now that I know to break up the onions in the pkg you buy and plant them individually rather than in the clump you buy them in, haha! They each seriously got to be about the size of radishes, but were good none-the-less), green peppers, jalapenos, habenero peppers (while plant shopping I recognized the name from the Food Network Channel and bought 3 plants...turns out one thing I DIDN'T remember was that they are way high up there on the "hot" scale for peppers...good thing we like spicy stuff and I only bought 3 vs 6 jalapeno plants we planted), zucchini, yellow squash, lemon cucumbers (that we only saw a few of has Lucy really seems to enjoy them and frequently treated herself to them before we could pick them) and some poor bean plants that never made it through the cold beginning.
After finding a canner at Walmart for $19 (best $19 I've spent in a long time), I decided to start preserving some of our summer goods! Here is what I have put up so far:
- Strawberry Rhubarb Jam (done earlier this summer with my mom--totally yummy)
- Jalapenos (pickled)
- Peaches
- Pears
- Rhubarb-Orange Jam
- Peach Freezer Jam
- Apricot Freezer Jam
- Applesauce (to come in the next few weeks)
