Produce

When we came home from vacation, I went over to the old house to clean a little more, water and pick some of the grapes and tomatoes that were ripe. Kevin and I love open faced tomato sandwiches. All I do for this is chop the tomatoes, add garlic and parmesan cheese, mix and put it on toast. Of course, it only works with a real garden tomato, which are way better than the grocery store variety. I also had so many grapes that I froze a bunch whole by lying them out flat first, so they would freeze individually, then I put them in bags. Then the neighbor came over with a box of about fifteen peaches. Oh, yum. She then found out we had five children and she came back with a huge bag. I then had to run out and drop something off at my aunts who has a farm just outside of the city we live in. You can see it here www.dieckmannfarms.com, they also do a weekly delivery during their sixteen week harvesting season. She described to me how they stagger their harvest and how they used large fans to compensate for the low numbers of bees. She and her husband have fifteen acres of their own and then rent out another couple acres from the neighbors in exchange for some work they did cutting down trees. Well, anyway, she took me in her cold storage room and told me to help myself to anything I wanted and then proceeded to load my car with peaches, plums, poullots, cucumbers and cantalope.

She also gave me a jar of pickles she had just canned. I wish I could have taken a picture of her pantry-all of those clean glass jars full of homemade produce were beautiful. I got home and called my sister, who has a really good sized garden and cans. I ended up deciding to freeze most of the peaches in a light syrup, because I don't have the right equipment and couldn't find it-I will by next year, though. I found directions here http://www.pickyourown.org/peachesfreezing.htm. Right when I was done with this our Bishop came over with a present of tomatoes and lemon cucumbers. The lemon cucumbers are so yummy, I decided to attempt to save the seed and grow my own.
All of this fresh produce and I didn't even really grow my own garden. God has truly blessed me.
I am now itching to grow a garden and decided I would try to see what I could do with a fall garden and maybe I can use the sunroom as a green house. So I got pots and dirt and planted a variety of vegetables. The carrots just poked their heads up yesterday and I saw a few beans today. I will be overjoyed if I can pull off a fall potted garden.