Garden Update

I'm just going to throw a bunch of pictures at you this morning so you can see the abundance and variety of produce that is coming out of our gardens.   Why not have a cup of coffee and relax a few minutes as you flip through the following images?

I had put a chuck roast in the crock pot the other day and realized I didn't have any carrots or potatoes.....duh!   Then I realized I had some of both in the garden.  A few minutes later I had this small bunch of new carrots.....

and after only a few minutes of digging....

 .....we had a bowl full of beautiful potatoes!  The carrots and potatoes were delicious with the roast.

 Next came the beets which I canned as pickled beets....all ready to make red beet eggs, a Penna. Dutch favorite of mine.

Nothing goes to waste here on the farm....the carrot tops and beet greens went to the pigs who greedily scooped them up.

They sure did enjoy eating our castoffs.

Yup, just a small pile of my canning reference books and jars of goodies waiting to be labeled.   We've got peach honey butter and seedless blackberry jam.

And dozens of jars of sweet, dill and bread and butter pickles.

Next, I have some pics of our fledgling orchard.   We have lost a few trees and some are just leaves because they are too young to produce fruit yet.   But a couple of trees have decided to get a head start on the others.  This apple tree has 9 apples on it.   Woo-hoo!   That won't be enough to make a pie, but we'll enjoy them just the same.

And this baby tree proudly produced one lovely apple.

Our granddaddy pear tree is another story.    He has hundreds of pears all along his many branches.    That's going to be fun this Fall.    Guess I had better start looking up some pear recipes.

The grapes are going crazy on both grape arbors.   The farmer told us he gets 30 gallons of grapes off just this one arbor.   That's a lot of grapes!

This is our lone blueberry bush that sits all by itself in front of the farmhouse.   It's almost as tall as I am and has quite a few berries on it this year.   And they are just starting to ripen.   I'll be putting these jewels in the freezer with their cousins, the blackberries.   We've picked gallons of blackberries so far in the field surrounding our property.

Well, that's what is growing and getting canned this week here on the farm.   Next post I'll show you the latest chick adventure.

'Till then,
Debbie