We’ve had a pretty decent garden this year given the fact that we planted beans and corn so late. I’ve definitely had my fill of corn on the cob and Nancy was giving fresh corn away to the neighbors. Yesterday she went out and picked a bucket full of beans from one of the bean rows. We’re going to try bottling them today. We still have another bean row left that needs to be harvested but it’s raining all weekend. Tomatoes have been good but not great – enough to eat and make salsa from but not enough to bottle. I tried a new method of pruning and staking them this year and it was certainly a learning experience. Carrots weren’t that great but we did dig up a few. Strawberries and raspberries made it through the hot summer so hopefully we’ll have a good crop of those next year.
One of our neighbors is a landscape designer and I think he chuckles at what he probably considers our crass and ugly landscaping. When he came into the backyard he noticed our garden and said, “Wow, that’s a nice garden, where did you get your topsoil from?” When he got closer to the garden he realized it wasn’t top soil but just plain old South Jordan clay and he was surprised that we could get the harvest that we did.
Starting to look like fall
The best crop of all this year was pumpkins. We have a lot of empty space in the backyard that we haven’t landscaped yet and pumpkins so we planted two pumpkin plants on the north side of the house. Nancy tended and watered them all summer and we ended up with several nice pumpkins from the two plants. One for each of the kids to carve for Halloween. Thanks to Nancy for taking care of the garden during the hot summer months. I get gung-ho in the spring but then lose steam as the summer starts to get hot. Nancy keeps the garden going throughout the summer until I start to get interested again around fall and think about tilling the garden and composting and ordering seed catalogs and such.
We’ll let you know how our canning operation goes. Beans have to be bottled with a pressure canner – they are low acid so you can’t use the hot water bath like you can with tomatoes. Nancy went off on a shopping trip to get the supplies she needed and I’m pretty sure I’ll be pressed into spending all afternoon into snipping beans during the second session of General Conference.
the problem with bottling the beans isn’t the the pressure canner method, or the snipping, it’s that you then have to eat beans!
Call me crazy but I like bottled green beans better than fresh green beans. I never minded the bottled beans we used to eat as kids.
wow, those pumpkins are gorgeous. I can’t wait to see how your raspberries fare next year.
did you know that I took the picture? I’ve never been good at taking pictures, but I guess this one is passable.