fall

i realized that, contrary to my usual m.o., this is the last picture that i had posted of my garden, and i really haven't talked about it much since then.

now it looks like this. it's quite the jungle. every year, we learn more and more about gardening. for instance, even though i really like tomatoes, sixteen plants was too much for the space and they ended up competing too much. only the front ones really produced like they were supposed to. don't get me wrong, we would have used the tomatoes from all sixteen plants if they had been productive (i'm aching for more tomatoes to can), but it was too ambitious for such a small plot. i feel like a hunter, wading through the jungle, every time i go out to pick.

also, no matter how much i like the idea of zucchini, i get sick of it by the end of the season. and with a small freezer, even two plants was too much this year.

and cucumbers don't vine well. they need their space to run. sad.

but, we've still had lots of tomatoes. we've eaten plenty, i've canned 20 jars of marinara sauce so far, hope to do more this weekend, and i've dried a ton of yellow pear tomatoes.

one of the awesome things about the house we are renting is that it has a nice little peach tree in the yard. not too big that it is overwhelming, but enough that we are going to be able to can, freeze, and eat the peaches from it. they have just started to ripen in the last week, so today madeleine and i went out and picked all of the fruit. in a couple days, we will be up to our ears in ripe peaches.

the tree is small enough that even madeleine could reach some of the peaches.

after picking the peaches, diane woke up from her nap and joined us outside to play.

still waking up...

not really sure...

good to go.

have i mentioned that i love fall? i love the harvest and the rush to preserve all of the food that is suddenly upon us. it's the payoff for a season of labor in the heat.

i love the crisp mornings and warm afternoons. sweater season around the corner. i love the changing colors. i love looking out my window and seeing bursts of color on the mountain. can't wait to drive up the canyon. i love the change and the move towards the holidays.

it's a great season.

in the yard

we've been enjoying our yard lately. the flowers are in bloom and are beautiful. madeleine likes to "help" when i water the garden. 

i let her water the grass. 

some of our irises.

our neighbors have these gorgeous peonies that peek through our chain link fence (i guess chain link is good for something?). i am pretty jealous of them. they mingle with our irises and tease me. i was going to steal some that were on our side of the fence to put inside, but hadn't gotten around to it yet. we were at church yesterday and i complimented our neighbor on the peonies and she said, "feel free to snip some to put in your house." permission granted.

 

spring never lasts long enough for me. but i guess that summer means vegetables, so i won't complain too much.

planted

some of my greatest joys, as well as my deepest disappointments, come from gardening. i planted my garden in the evening yesterday. i carefully checked the weather forecast and it looks like i am in the clear for planting. just to be safe though, i covered the smallest plants to protect the from the cold.

because i didn't think it was going to snow last year and it did.

everything went into shock as soon as i planted. which i knew would happen. i just hate to see it happen. it causes all of this angst, inner turmoil, and pessimism within me. plus, i kept waking up in the middle of the night and wondering how they were doing.

i am way too emotionally invested in this for it to be healthy.

i woke up this morning and went to check on the plants. some of them look great and they should pull through just fine. some not so much. are they still in shock? i haven't been doing this for long enough to know when i should give up hope.

i'm not optimistic about my cucumbers (i think that the key is to plant them before the starts get too big? so the broad leaves don't droop on the ground and get stuck to the soil? is this making any sense?)

the zucchini look like they'll pull through. surprisingly, most of the tomatoes look like they will, too. but my juliets are droopier than i'd like and they're impossible to buy starts for. the abe lincolns look dead. not mostly dead, but dead. and i'm not surprised. i had such hope for them when i bought them. the name alone was so promising. but the starts have struggled since the beginning and i'm not shocked (get it?) to see them like they are. there are two other tomato plants (can't remember which variety) that look dead too, but we're just going to have to wait it out. hopefully they pull through.

good thing i planted 16 tomato plants.

see what i mean? so many emotions in gardening. it's that season again.

i've got my love to keep me warm

on gloomy days like this, when snow isn't so far behind us and there's no end in sight for the rainy forecast, i find comfort in my little army of green sprouting on my kitchen table. round two of planting is just starting to surface and i can't tell you how many times i go over to the table to poke, prod and see if anything new is popping up. i am amazed at how much seems to change every few hours.

garden prep/planning is my sanity in the transition between winter and spring.

canning tomatoes

as part of my preservation kick, i decided to can some marinara sauce and diced tomatoes. i wish i could say that my tomato plants were producing enough for me to can some, but they aren't. don't get me wrong, they are producing enough for us to eat (almost) as many as we want fresh, but not enough to can.

so, i went and bought a big box of tomatoes and made a whole lot of marinara sauce. it is a delicious recipe and i am excited to eat it all winter.

and i even had some tomatoes left over to can diced tomatoes. these should be great in recipes. they better be, because canning is a lot of work.

this weekend? peaches. maybe pears. we'll see.

preserving summer

plums from our plum tree*

with us being gone for three weeks, our fruit trees producing rapidly, and simply having a much larger garden this year, i have a lot of fresh produce on my hands that i want to preserve. i have been busy, busy, busy this last week trying to find ways to keep the memory and taste of summer's bounty alive through the coming winter.

with the plums, i cut up a bunch and froze them to use for smoothies, but i also decided to try my hand at fruit leather - a new venture for me. i got some advice from my expert aunt and then decided that even though i didn't have everything i needed to really make it the way i wanted to that day, i would try a little sample by doing one batch in my oven overnight.

i pulled out my plum and banana fruit leather in the morning and it looked beautiful. until i tried to pull it off and realized that wax paper is not an appropriate substitute for seran wrap or parchment paper. whoops. i should have waited until i bought more seran wrap and borrowed a dehydrator from a friend.

they still look pretty, right?

i had a lot of basil that needed to be used, some fresh garlic left over from another recipe, and just the right amount of pine nuts in my pantry, so i decided to make pesto late one evening.

i froze it for later use, since we had already had some fresh pesto just a few nights before. i have heard of this method before but never tried it. it doesn't look too appetizing, but should taste fine. hopefully it works out. we only have fun shaped ice cube trays in our house, so i have triangle and stick pesto.

these are the berries i picked this week.

i canned some blackberry jam with them...

and made a delicious pie. my first pie, ever.

served up with a scoop of tilamook vanilla ice cream. delicious.

although this has nothing with preserving, this my latest favorite: a pear and pecan salad that i have probably eaten four times for lunch this week. it is a great summer salad. easy to make and impressive for guests. i have been eating it with poppy seed dressing instead of the dressing in the recipe, but that dressing is great, too.

it has been fun to try my hand at some different methods of food preservation that i haven't tried before and i am looking forward to making the most of my garden/tree situation this summer and doing some more into the fall. canning diced tomatoes and marinara sauce, canning and freezing peaches and pears, canning applesauce, drying apples, and a few other things are still on the list. we'll see how it goes. my children may mutiny before the season is up. i'm sure madeleine is sick of me putting her off "just a couple more minutes," while i try to finish cutting up more plums or whatever else i am working on. she'll thank me this winter?

*great photos courtesy of audrey's camera. she lost it at byu last week and thankfully, someone turned it in. i picked it up from campus for her and couldn't resist taking some great shots with it before returning it. thanks, audrey. i think i might need one of my own.

harvest

i just got home from almost a week away (more on that to come) and came home to a bounteous harvest from my garden.

sugar snap peas



the last of my spinach.

and carrots galore. these suckers are hard to harvest. i had to really dig around them to loosen up the soil before i could finally pull them out. and even then (as you can see), i had a few casualties.

this was a fun one to dig up.

i am looking forward to more of the same, as well as some new veggies. zucchinis are coming and i know they will be huge in the blink of an eye. the peppers are starting to change color and the tomatoes are fruiting, but not ripe yet. those can't come fast enough. everything else is still coming along. sick of hearing about it yet? just wait until the fruit trees give me something to talk about...

yard pictures

you may be sick of pictures from our yard, but i wanted to post some pictures for my grandma, who is far away from her beautiful flowers right now.

the white roses are just starting to come out, so they are not covering the bushes yet, but they are beautiful.

madeleine was out taking pictures with me and insisted on a picture in front of the flowers. you'll notice a theme throughout the post.

these aren't in full bloom yet, but they are close. i'm excited for the red ones to bloom.

and now, for the irises...

grandma, i wish you could smell these lilacs.