Our Garden Journey

If you have stumbled upon our humble blog please be advised. We are not expert gardeners nor would we ever claim to be. We are novices, newbies, wannabes. Call us what you will, but we are just some folks trying to find a better way to feed ourselves that honors the origin of that food and really enjoying the discoveries we find along the way. This is our garden journey.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

My Helping Hands



It has been the best year so far for garden/kid interaction.  One of my favorite things in the summer is to see their tiny little heads bobbing up and down in the garden looking for treasured sugar snap peas or hearing them grunt as they pull up a gigantic carrot and then come running to me with such pride for what they have found.  I feel so lucky to be able to teach the kids about where their food comes from and hopefully they will respect it more when they eat it. 

Bounty

 
So we've been a little distracted with the starting of school for the kids and heavier work loads and now I'm behind on updating this little blogspot.  It's a good thing the garden pretty much takes care of itself at this point in the season.  Sure, we still have to weed and salvage plants that have fallen prey to the pesky squirrels and possibly raccoons, but since the rain has started up again at a nice steady pace all we have to really do is reap the benefits.

The tomato gods have been really good to us this year, obviously, because the plants are literally falling over with fruit.  Everyday I have to pick a few in fear that they will just snap in two from the weight of them.  We probably picked two quarts of cherry tomatoes a day and at least 6 to 8 early girls and valencias.  Until just this week (with the cold spell) we could barely keep up.  We've canned a few, eaten a ton and plan on "salsafying" the rest for canning purposes as well.   




The peppers come in at a close second for bounty.  We did plant quite a few jalapenos and its a good thing because I love'em!  We pickled a bunch and I can't wait to dig into them this winter.  They have so much more kick than the store bought ones.  The one pepper I'm disappointed in this year is our Bell.  The plants  suffered near suffocation from being planted too close to the leeks (which went nuts this year!) and being surrounded by too many tall tomato plants.