garden braggin'

Just so you don't think we're only all about the house, we've been actively gardening and hauling in the proceeds from all our work early this Spring. Above are approx. 2 and a 1/2 bushels of red skinned and kenebeck potatoes we harvested. In amongst all those big, beautiful taters are a bunch of little tiny potatoes which got added to some vegetable soup Lisa canned along with fresh green beans, crowder peas, tomato sauce from last year, corn from the farmers market and carrots from the CSA. Many of these potatoes will end up in the freezer as the red doesn't keep as well. Lisa runs them through her mandolin slicer so they look like short french fries and blanches them before freezing them on a cookie sheet. She then stores them in a zip lock bag for later cooking as roasted potatoes. The kenebecks, which store much better, will end up in the root cellar that's a part of the new house.

The blue berries have been coming in strong for the past two weeks, we have harvested on average a little over a gallon every other day. we have 5 gallons in the freezer (we need 7 minimum to get through the rest of the year) and expect we'll get that many by the time the berries are exhausted. No pesticides or chemical fertilizers on any of the stuff from the garden. Tonight, Lisa canned nine pints of salsa and expects to can another twenty or so as the tomatoes come in. While our garden has done extremely well, we'll be expanding it this winter as the house site gets settled. We are making notes about the things we want to be sure and grow larger quantities of including soybeans, peppers, onions and garlic. We've already bought some raspberry plants to expand our berry production.

Finally, we've enjoyed our first harvest from our blackberries. Lisa made some blackberry muffins this morning which were out of this world. We are not saving too many of these as we are eating them fresh but hope to have enough planted in the future to also store some for the rest of the year.