planting, growing, canning...etc.

Veggies anyone?? 

veggie tales

Our garden is in full force and most of our meals are composed of a minimum of one garden veggie, but usually more than that.

Here is a salad made entirely of garden yummies....spinach, green onion, grape tomato, carrot, pepper, cucumber, and sugar snap peas.

This is what our fridge looks like on a typical day.

We have also had a chicken vegetable soup, vegetable lasagna, Mexican rice with added pepper and zucchini, and stuffed peppers.

We didn't plant our own corn since it doesn't do well unless you can plant a significant amount and our garden is on the small side, however, we were endowed with quite a bit last evening.  We live across from the community garden, which is done by volunteers to benefit the food pantry.  Well, they had more corn than they knew what to do with, so I gratefully took the extra off their hands!

They girls were so eager to have some, that they didn't even wait for it to be cooked...Anna ate EVERY SINGLE kernel on her cob and finished up what Maria left.  Then they ate more of it cooked for dinner.  Larry and I husked, cooked, cut and froze 36 cups worth after the girls were in bed.  We will sure enjoy it in the dead of winter when it takes like fresh corn off the cob!

The Garden

Well at final tally, this is what we gleaned our of the garden this summer.

1. Planning/Planting 3 hours

2. Weeding 10

3. Picking 6

4. Preserving 7.5

5 Money invested on seeds, plants approx. $40

Acorn Squash 7

Banana Peppers 93

Beans 9.5#

Beets 3#

Bell Peppers 87

Broccoli 5 bunches

Butternut Squash 8

Cabbage 3 heads

Carrots 5#

Cauliflower 3 bunches

Cherry Tomato 14.75#

Cucumber 70

Eggplant 34

Kohlrabi 11

Onion 11

Peas 7#

Summer Squash 35

Tomato 248

Zucchini 31

YUM

anticipation

We have been waiting quite a while to enjoy this lovely red bell pepper...and tonight is the night! Doesn't it look yummy?

We have plenty to praise God for; yummy red bell peppers.

sunflowers

Yep, these are the gigantic sunflowers...so beautiful.

We have plenty to praise God for; such a variety of beautiful flowers, from the very delicate small to the sturdy large, we can enjoy so many.

a 4-H winner for sure

Yep, these sunflowers have grown like crazy, and they were the ones we started from seed not seedlings like the other ones in the flower bed that are maybe 4 feet tall. Grandpa was helping Maria try to reach to the top. She was almost there, and considering my dad is about 6'4" that is one tall sunflower! Maybe we should join 4-H.

We have plenty to praise God for; amazingly beautiful flowers.

conjoined squash

Don't you love that we have conjoined twin summer squash. Can you guess what the vegetable of the week is at our house...let's see how many different ways you can eat squash. Actually my favorite is to slice and cook with a little butter and brown sugar. YUM, YUM...sounds good enough to go snack on.

I am going to try and start a little tally system of all the garden produce we get. I have had several people comment that they don't think a garden is worth their time. I am curious what we find out. The time and money we put into it and the results we get out of it.

We have plenty to praise God for; such a yummy variety of good things to eat...imagine just having manna.

stir-fry

We enjoyed stir fry tonight that was almost completely from the garden; peas, beans, carrots, squash, zucchini, kohlrabi, peppers. We also had celery and chicken, which aren't from our garden :)

I also had enough veggies to make a stir fry mix and freeze it for later. I froze two gallon size bags of beans and one of peas too. And this is just the beginning of the beans.

We have plenty to praise God for; this garden is going strong.

more bars in more places...

from the big and beautiful to the baby bite size...Bugs Bunny would be jealous.

We have plenty to praise God for; beautiful rains to nourish our garden.

garden spoils

We have started to get more of a variety of goodies from the garden. Here is a picture of a head of cabbage, 3 kohlrabi, some carrots, and 3 peppers. This week it looks like we will have some eggplant, broccoli, and summer squash ready in addition to more peppers and carrots. We are looking forward to some good eats!

We have plenty to praise God for; a productive garden.

Peas anyone?

Yep, we had a bountiful crop of sugar snap peas, much to Larry's delight, but they are pretty well done now. So I froze quite a few bagfuls. It seems I was picking about a bowlful each day, so we can't keep up with eating them fresh. In December, we will be remembering the tastiness of our garden.

From left; melons and squash, eggplants and peppers, zucchini and cucumbers, onions and kohlrabi, beets, cabbage and broccoli and cauliflower.
From left tomatoes, green beans, carrots, sugar snap peas
We had quite a few kohlrabi fresh, froze some and even gave a couple away. Had fresh beets with dinner last week, and are looking forward to some peppers being ready soon. We did have some banana peppers last week, but apparently the HOT on the label really meant that they were hot ones. I assumed, quite incorrectly, that since they were the only kind at the nursery, that they just labeled them hot and they were like the mild kind we enjoyed last summer! So luckily a good friend has a use for them in some salsa.

We also have lots of tomato blossoms and many small green tomatoes. We think a visiting deer has enjoyed our plants, as evidenced by the chewed off tops. So I put out some deterrents the other day. A bar of soap, netting over the plants, aluminum pie pans, plastic grocery bags, turning the motion sensor light toward the garden, and a radio playing out the garage window at night...good old talk radio...are all my attempts to keep them away. You might be thinking, uh, I thought they lived in town. Well, we technically do, but on the very edge. There are no houses on the other side of the street where the deer come from, only baseball diamonds and fields beyond that. And an added temptation to the deer, there is a large community garden across the street also, full of plenty of good eats. Also the neighbor, who routinely walks her dog along the street by our garden, was gone on vacation last week. So all of these factors led to a couple of visits from our friendly deer population. We'll see if the return of the dog walking helps.

We are loving all the flowers that are in bloom too...the sunflowers in the garden are taller than Maria!

We have plenty to praise God for; a bountiful garden.

First fruits

Yum, Yum, Strawberry Shortcake here we come!
We have plenty to praise God for; strawberries from our garden!

all fenced in!

We have been eagerly anticipating a new fence to contain our "back" yard...and I say "back" because most everyone uses the back door as the main entrance since it is closest to the church entrance, and we have streets on 3 out of the 4 sides of our house.   This entrance unfortunately leads them through the office, usually a messier room just because I do my projects/crafts in there.  Now maybe it will look more like a backyard, not sure that will make people use the front more, but we could hope.  Regardless, we are so happy to have a way to allow Maria more freedom to play in the yard, while we do something in the house, work in the yard, etc. without worrying every 5 seconds that she went out into the road.

We also have planted a garden again this year, our third.  Here is last year (which we never got to fully enjoy, since we moved mid July). We have a smaller plot than before, but just enough to handle with a newborn and a two year old around.  We spent about 4 hours weeding out the grass yesterday. Since it is a newly tilled plot, grass is going to be an issue for a while.  Most other weeds were taken care of by the Preen we applied early on.  Most of the seeds we planted have come up, with the exception of the onions, leek and spinach.  We replanted the spinach and got some onion sets to replace the seeds.  We have a nice amount of beets, carrots, peas, lettuce, kohlrabi, and sunflowers coming up.  We did starts of broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage that were transplanted a couple weeks ago.  We have starts of cucumber, zucchini, cantaloupe, and summer, butternut and acorn squash that Larry is planting in the picture.  I bought tomato, eggplant, bell peppers and banana peppers from a local nursery.  I also seeded the green beans yesterday.  So if we get some of all that we have planted, we should have a nice mix of fresh produce this summer.  

We have plenty to praise God for; a new fence and a promising looking garden!

mary, mary quite contrary

How does your garden grow?

Such a good little helper!  Although we may have a few scattered seeds from her help.

We have plenty to praise God for; wonderful weather that let us get the garden started.

spending the day with violet

well, violets to be exact! We HAD a flowerbed full of them... Before!

and we conquered them! Larry and I spent about 4 hours weeding, moving some plants and mulching. It was a long day, but the result was well worth it.

Maria helping mommy and daddy!

Yesterday I finally finished the bathroom(scroll down for before pictures), put things back on the wall and cleaned up. I am pretty happy with the results. I plan to paint a couple more things; the vanity cupboard, the light fixture(the metal is rusty), the exhaust fan cover, and the door and then I need to clean up some grout, re grout in a few places, and seal the grout. I am hoping to eventually redo the flooring, but that will be the last thing I do.

EggplantPeppersTomatoesHere are a couple pictures of some of the goodies that we can't wait to eat. Since we had to transplant things from DeMotte here, we haven't had as much as we would have, a little moving shock for all of us!

We also were blessed by seeing a hummingbird at out feeder tonight. We were excited since we had put one up in the past and never saw anything. We put this up two days ago and they found it already.

So it was a busy couple of days, and we are ready to relax on Sunday...may you a have a blessed Lord's day.

We have plenty to praise God for; great cool weather to get lots accomplished.

beautiful blooms

Some of our mystery bulbs we planted last year from church came up and surprised us with such beauty! And other bushes started blooming too. I love Spring.

We have plenty to praise God for; beautiful colors.