A salad a day to keep the doctor away!

Derek and I have eaten a salad from our garden nearly every day since early May!  The lettuce and spinach did really well here, as well as the rainbow swiss chard.  So much spinach and not enough time resulted in 2 foot tall spinach plants that are desperately trying to “go to seed” and stop producing yummy leaves.  I keep pinching off the seed buds.  Take that, spinach!  I think it will finally win in about a week though.  The nice thing about the cool weather here is that I can re-plant spinach for the whole season.  Yay!

Green garden!

I planted way too many Romaine/Buttercrunch plants.  I wish I could have bought maybe 1-2 individual romaine starts instead of a 4 (or 6?) pack.  Same with the buttercrunch.

Romaine

Buttercrunch

The green leafy lettuce, started from seed, isn’t my favorite. It’s very pale green which makes me think it’s lacking in nutrients compared to my dark green spinach, or even the dark green romaine.

Broccoli got HUGE.  I had no idea it would get that big.  There are 4 or 5 plants, and today we discovered that in 2 days they started to flower.  Oops!  Last night, we cut the main stalks off those and had Cream of Broccoli soup (left the flowers on).

Huge Broccoli

Peas!  We added some height to the fence for the peas to climb.  They’re about 6 feet now and we picked pods today.  They are sweet, juicy and crunchy!

The carrot tops are tall and starting to flop over, but I don’t think they’re ready yet.  It’s too late now, but I recently read that I was supposed to thin the carrots to every  2 inches.  Oops.

The green beans are starting to flower… which means green beans soon!

The hanging plants are no longer hanging.  I gave up about 3 weeks ago and transplanted them into the ground.  During that process I dropped another tomato plant, snapping off the stalk : ( I decided to try just sticking the stalk in the ground, and it took a bit for the roots to regrow, but it worked!

First tomato!

I bought two new tomato plants since 3 had been casualties in my attempts to hang them in milk jugs. I bought a cherry tomato variety (indeterminate, so its growing huge like a bush) and an Early Girl, which is putting out some little green marble-sized tomatoes. I also bought 2 more pepper plants because the transplanted ones are still quite small. I’ve got little tiny peppers starting on the bell pepper plant and the jalapeno is looking good too.

First peppers!

We doubled the size of the garden space a few weeks ago.  The only things planted back there are an acorn squash, a butternut squash, a cucumber and a pumpkin.  The pumpkin is doing well, despite it being in shade for the end of the day.

Pumpkin flower

Since I had to work on Fourth of July at 8pm, I made an American Flag cake and we grilled salmon and veggies on July 6 instead : )

cake!

Last weekend was the last weekend of strawberry picking, so we took advantage.  As opposed to the strawberry farms in Virginia, here it is actually a better deal to pick your own – $1.50/lb!  We picked 7.5 pounds and headed home.  I made two kinds of freezer jam.  One was recommended by my cousin Erin – a Honey Strawberry Jam with apple juice and lemon juice – click for Recipe, and a Strawberry Rhubarb freezer jam – Recipe here.  I had enough extra and 2 jars left to try the recipe on the low-sugar pectin jar, and decided to even try it with real canning.  It seems to have sealed, but I hope I didn’t seal in any bacteria.  We’ll see!!

I also, of course, made strawberry shortcake : )

Strawberry shortcake!

And hi from Colby.

Big!

He loves his pig. (and look at those big boy teeth!)

Pig needs a bath.

And more photos!!