Friday, August 08, 2008

First Garden Bounty

Our garden is starting to produce and we are so happy. I'm so grateful Paul's mother planted a bunch of veggies for us in her garden. Most of the food above is from her garden. The picture below is our first bell pepper from our garden. It's so pretty and smells so good, I almost don't want to eat it. The tomatoes are starting to turn red, we ate a few little cherry tomatoes this week and the chili peppers are doing awesome. We'll have more than enough little red chilis for several months.
We worked hard all week to get everything put up for winter. So far this week we've done 2 qts and 7 pints of peaches, 3 qts of cherries, froze 12 cups grated zucchini, made 2 cherry pies and froze them, 4 pints of dill pickles and dehydrated a ton of squash and zucchini. The herbs out front are getting huge and I'll probably dry another batch of basil, sage, oregano, thyme and tarragon this weekend. Paul also worked hard to make several batches of his wonderful homemade wheat bread. It's nice to have the bread ready to go in the freezer.
I ruined my dehydrator trying to dry candied cherries. Luckily Paul was able to find me another one at the store. This one is slightly bigger and has a better fan setup, which allows for quicker drying. However, the best gift I got this week was from a friend that loves to go to yardsales, she picked up 100 canning jars for me for only $10!! That's an amazing find. We are set for canning jars for quite awhile.

School started today and life will be very interesting and crazy for awhile. I'm anticipating very little sleep but I am excited to get started.

2 comments:

Rose said...

You've certainly been busy.
That is exactly how i'd like to be. I (well my Hubby mostly) have a Vege Garden but we're not as organised. I do love my Herbs though. I just use them as and when, but you've got some good pointers here. How do you Dry yours..?? I've tried in the past but didn't have much success.
Blessings to you today
Rose

Sarah said...

Hi Rose - To dry my herbs, I wait until they get fairly big and cut off several inches. I lay the entire cutting on the dehydrator tray. Herbs take very little time on the dehydrator, usually about 2 hours. Once they are dry, I crumble them into jars. Hope that helps! We love having our own dried herbs.