New Peaches

Another canning endeavor this morning. We canned peaches from our miniature “Honey Babe” peach tree. We got seven pints. Could have eight but Sweetcheeks decided to favor me some peach cobbler instead. I certainly can’t complain about that.

 

Zucchini Relish 2014

Although I have not blogged about my garden for a long while, I do want to get started again. I thought I would start by telling you about our first canning this season. We had an excess of zucchini and yellow squash so thought we would make some relish. We have canned 14 pints total.

Pickled Beets

Today we decided to pickle beets. We had previously canned beets but this time we were going to pickle them just using a hot water bath method

We started with 28 beets weighing about 7 lbs. and ended up with 8 pints of finished beets. We probably have enough still left in the garden to do this many more in another week or so.

Needless to say – we love pickled beets.

June Veggie Garden Update

The garden is starting to produce pretty well.    We pick  Patty Pan and Zucchini squash just about every day.  We are also starting to get cucumbers pretty regularly as well.  This first picture gives you a sense of how big our squash plants are.

We canned 12 pints of   beets the other day.  We plan to pickle some beets in the next few days.

I’ve been struggling with a couple of problems.  The leaves on my tomato plants are curling upward.  Everything I’ve read tells me that this is a regular watering issue.  I water with a drip system every two days.  That’s pretty regular.  I may be watering too much or too little but I haven’t quite figured out which yet.  I always seem to struggle with getting just the right amount of water.  Any ideas? Let me know!

I’ve also had to spray with soapy water twice to control an aphid problem.  That has helped.  We also released some lady bugs a few days ago.

My tomato plants are growing pretty well.  We are starting to see a few small tomatoes starting to form.

Summer Squash Surplus

We have had so many Patty Pan and Zucchini squash we are about sick of them.  I took about 10# to the Salvation Army Food Bank yesterday.  I would hate to see them go to waste.  We have made zucchini bread, eggs, sausage, and squash scramble, zucchini relish, steamed squash, etc.  I need new ideas for how to use summer squash.  Any ideas out there in blogland?  HELP!

Zucchini Relish

Leona put up 5 pints of zucchini relish last Friday. We got the recipe from a garden  blog which I follow.   We seem to always have more zucchini than we can eat so when I saw this recipe that Mavis had on her website ( Please check it out), I convinced my wife to try it.

It was very, very good.  We had some of it today with hot dogs.  We plan to can quite a bit more of it in the future.

Canning Stewed Tomatoes

Last Friday we canned our first tomatoes this summer.  We put up 6 pints of stewed tomatoes.  We had planted Roma tomatoes this year and so far the yield has been pretty good.  We used about 40 tomatoes (about 9 lbs.) for the six pints.  The plants are still just loaded with more tomatoes.  We expect lots more canning to be done in the future.   These are really sweet and have a wonderful taste.   See pictures below.