I've been pretty busy lately, so I've been slacking off with my blog. Our garden is the reason. I took pictures of thing to put on here, but wouldn't you know it? I can't get them off of the camera onto the computer. I'll have them up when I can get them.
Back to the garden. It did really well, even with the deer helping themselves. I didn't weigh everything, but what I did weigh came to 329.25 pounds. That's:
138 pounds of potatoes
54 pounds of onions
27 pounds of carrots
38 pounds of cucumbers
29.75 pounds of zucchini
29 pounds of tomatoes
13.50 pounds of patty pan squash
2 bushels of spinach
25 pea pods
2 green beans
Deer really like peas and green beans. We are still harvesting corn and my lima beans are still playing around.
25 pounds of the tomatoes were green. They just didn't ripen anywhere this year and had to be harvested before the frost go to them. I looked for recipes for green tomatoes and found the usual fried green tomatoes. I was looking for sauce. I decided to cook them all, without seasoning, so I could use it for different things. I ended up with 9 pints and 7 quarts of green tomato sauce. It looks like green enchilada sauce. I also have 1 quart of red tomato sauce. I hope the green tomato sauce is edible and not a waste of time and effort.
I spent 12 hours working on my 25 pounds of green tomatoes. I had planned on freezing it, but lack of freezer space, (we only have the small one on our side by side fridge), said I needed to can it. What a long day that was. I finished canning my last batch at 11:15PM.
It was my idea to plant a lot of tomatoes, but I was thinking the harvesting would be staggered, not an all at once thing, except for the few ripe tomatoes we had. Deer started helping themselves to the ripe tomatoes as the summer went on.
I am freezing and dehydrating potatoes. This kind doesn't have a long shelf life, but I thought it would be longer than it is. It's not.
Carrots are being dehydrated. I also dehydrated zucchini.
I still have 3 gallon bags of cherries in the freezer. I had another one, but yesterday it became cherry cobbler.
This weekend we might be getting a bunch of concord and wine grapes, along with some sprouts.
I need to buy more jars this weekend. I thought I had enough when I first bought some, but I was wrong. This will be the third time I'm buying more. I need quarts and pints. I have enough 1/2 pints and 4-oz jars.
Once again, I think it would have been nice to start this self sufficiency thing at a younger age, but it didn't work out that way. I don't mind dehydrating and canning, but it would have been much nicer if it didn't happen all at one time with everything.
Chip says he's suffering from neglect because I haven't played with him as much lately. He started to sit up and beg when I walk by, and no one taught him how to do that. If that doesn't work, he throws himself on my feet and rolls around. I do add, he is very cute doing both these things, and he knows it, too.
After seeing how well the garden did, for the most part, I don't know if Tim still wants a bigger garden next year. We do need deer fencing,a freezer and a bigger dehydrator for next year. I also think I need to be cloned a few times to keep up with everything.