Before and After!

Here is a little trip down memory lane to remember what a difference two months and a lot of sunshine can make...

Peas and carrots in April.

Peas, carrots and a few beets up front in June.

 Swiss chard and spinach in April.

Spinach is gone so the swiss chard is with peppers in June.

The onions from sets in April.

Extreme close up of the onions in June!!

We started some onions from seed straight outdoors to see what they would do back in April in the front of the carrot bed.  Here is how much they have grown by June in comparison to the sets that we planted.  Now we know...

Preserving Party!!

When you have wonderful friends you can ask them to come over on a Saturday afternoon/evening and get them to do manual labor with you.  For the promise of dinner mine helped me blanch, shock and freeze all the green beans, broccoli and swiss chard that we currently had in the fridge.  It went a little something like this:

Harvest and wash veggies...

Cut veggies into bite size pieces...

Blanch for a few minutes in a pot of boiling hot water.  Then immediately shock veggies by putting them into a bowl of cold water and ice cubes to stop the cooking and preserve crispness.

Veggies will be much brighter in color!

We portioned ours in regular sandwich bags and then placed them all in a freezer bag so that they wouldn't freeze in one gigantic clump.

Lastly, Max couldn't take all that garden excitement and decided to harvest all the potatoes.  The baby russets were volunteer experiments from last year where we simply cut up a few old potatoes and threw them in the ground.  The red skinned potatoes were grown from starters we bought at the store.  That's 20lbs of potatoes you are looking at and we didn't even use the entire bag we bought for only $5!  Yum.

Weekend in pictures

Yellow, purple and green bean, banana pepper, jalapeno pepper and green bell pepper harvest!

Only doors and some trim left then it will be a masterpiece!!!

My first winter squash growing big!!  I think it's going to be a butternut...I'll have to consult the package to see what was in that mixture when I can find it...