Dan’s summer bounty part 1

Most of you know that we can tomatoes, lots and lots of tomatoes each and every year. These are all organic, from our garden using compost that we make all year long. We usually grow tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, basil, yellow squash and each year we try a few new things. This year one of our new items was eggplant. They were so pretty, however, we never really found a good way to cook them so we gave away most of them. What most of you don’t know is that Dan does almost all of our gardening, canning & freezing pretty much by himself. Sure I’m here for moral support and keeping him company but if it was left to me none of it would ever get done. Dan built the greenhouse, he starts the seeds, he tends to them then transplants them, he turns the compost, I do till the garden every year (that’s my favorite part) and I dig out all the walkways that help form our raised beds. Then we both plant all our veggies. Dan does most of the weeding and watering because even though I’m home and he’s at work I can never seem to water our gardens. Here is what we have put up so far from our garden:15 packages of corn (that actually came from the farmers market we don’t have enough space to grow corn)9 packages of sweet peppers (we’ll still have more to add, there are lots of peppers left in the garden) Here are 9 more bags of sweet peppers that we just added to the freezer Sunday.

Here is Dan’s Food Saver that he got for his b-day.

7 packages of oven dried tomatoes (this is the first year we’ve successfully dried tomatoes)

14 packages of pesto along with about 50 frozen mounds that we can add to sauces

10 quarts of dill pickles (the relish and sweet pickles are left over from last year)
and 37 quarts of tomatoes, mostly whole tomatoes but some are sauce. This is a pretty small yield of tomatoes for us, our plants seemed to have a disease this year so they didn’t do very well. In past years we have had up to 90 quarts of tomatoes.

This is what we have left in the garden:

More basil, good golly we already have enough pesto to feed half the city.

I love this plant, this is Thai basil (we have several different varieties of basil in the garden,) I believe we had about 8 basil plants before the wind storm came through. And here is a basil plant that has been taken out of the garden and put in a pot so it can grow in the greenhouse all winter long. Because we’re not going to have enough frozen basil we’ll also have fresh basil to get us through the winter. 🙂 Did I mention if anyone wants pesto let us know!

More sweet peppers; red, yellow and green. As long as it doesn’t frost they’ll keep ripening and we’ll keep picking them and freezing them.
We also have a late harvest of radishes that Dan just recently planted.
This is a huge Thyme plant that spent last winter in the green house, the summer outside in it’s pot and will be moved back to the green house this winter. I have only used it once on a lamb roast but i think Dan has made some vinegar with it and used it in some of his grilling.
And of course a fig. There are still a ton of green figs on our fig tree but not too many more of them will ripen since the days have gotten so much cooler. We did have a great harvest this year. Everyone loves to go pick fresh figs off the tree and eat them right away. They are so good. If you have never had a fresh fig make sure you come over and try one next summer! Dan also takes starts off this tree when he cuts it back each fall and pots them to share with friends. You have to baby a the fig tree, wrapping it up in the winter so it doesn’t freeze. But if you don’t mind the extra work the figs are definitely worth it!

Here’s a plate of figs from one of our summer pickings. They don’t last long, just long enough for Dan to snap a few pics. The we all gobble them up, yum!