Garden Diary

One of the purposes of having our blog this time of the year is to help us chronicle our garden.  It has seemed that the past two years, in between gardening seasons, we forget what we had planted, how much, when it started producing, how much we processed and the recipes we used.  

And so, today I am chronicling our garden from the past week.

6/17 - picked 1/2 gallon snow peas, cooked for dinner in a skillet with orange zest & 2 tbsp fresh orange juice and 2 tbsp fresh ginger.

6/22 - picket 2 head of cabbage.  Tried a new recipe from Better Homes, sweet and sour cabbage, I highly recommend it.  

6/23 - picked 1 head of broccoli, 9 jalapeno peppers and transparent apples.  The jalapeno peppers we remove seed stuff with a mix of cream cheese, bacon, garlic, onions and cheddar cheese, then grill until cooked through.  YUM!  The transparent apples are best used for applesauce, "fried" apples, or apple pie filling. But first the have to rest for several days to completely ripen.

6/24 - picked 1 head broccoli and 1 head of cabbage to give away.

6/25 - picked 1 gallon snow peas and 11 heads of broccoli (see picture above).  Blanched and vacuum sealed to freeze.  Processed 5 bags (about 2 cups each) snow peas and 12 bags of broccoli.

The garden, as you can tell, is coming into harvest.  Our second planting of snow peas will be ready by this weekend.  What is not included in above is our Raspberry picking.  Roughly every other night we are picking 1-2 quarts of raspberries.  Some are small, but most are the about the size of my thumb and sweet!  With any berries that we pick, we wash, lay them out on cookie sheets in the freezer then place them in freezer zip-lock bags (quart size).  By freezing them first on the cookie sheet it prevents the berries from squishing each other during the freezing and having an overabundance of frozen juice in the bottom of the bag.

Happy Gardening!