Preparing For the Future and Making Friends

 

Although our mini vacation just had us away for four days, our garden apparently didn't get the memo. Above is some of the picking we did in the late evening of the day we returned home and our garden was fully shaded for a few minutes before dusk fell.

Clockwise from the top are a pile of cucumbers, a pile of shishito peppers, three mostly ripe and bug eaten tomatoes, the first of the year, a pile of okra, one watermelon and a bowl of strawberries. Unshown is our onion crop which is currently curing in our garage under the light breeze of a fan. Does anyone else have a garage that smells of onion and garlic like mine? 

We gave a bag full of the cucumbers away to friends and the rest I got busy preserving the following day. I dill pickled the Japanese peppers which I love as a tangy and a bit spicy side dish with just about any heavy savory meal. I only discovered how much I love them last year when I pickled a handful of pints of last years crop late in the season. This year we planted about four times as much and I hope to pickle enough to last me several years. Next up, I kosher dill pickled the smallest whole cucumbers. We don't eat a lot of them that way but I do use them on occasion when I am making tuna and egg salad sandwich spread. They also just look nice on a pantry shelf. 

Finally, I ended up the day making sweet pickles out of the remainder of the cucumbers. They always go great topping a burger or a bratwurst.  The tomatoes still sit on the counter to fully ripen before consumption. This batch of okra was cut into chunks, vacuum bagged and frozen for future pots of gumbos where they act as a natural thickening agent. Future okra will go into some Filipino dishes and late in the season I will pickle some too. I usually use a spicier dill pickle mix for the okra. The watermelon is still chilling in the fridge but not for long and my daughter turned the strawberries into topping for some shortcake a day later. 

The not yet photographed onion crop was a mixed bag. The white onions we planted didn't do that well and mostly produced stunted and oddly shaped bulbs. I won't be planting them again. The red onions however did fairly well and we got some decent sized bulbs as well as quite a few on the smaller side. I'm sure there is some sort of deficiency in the soil that once taken care of will make them even better in the future once fully amended. 

For the next week or so though, life should be fairly easy as I keep picking the okra, peppers and strawberries as they ripen while waiting for the first batch of tomatoes to start ripening in cannable quantities. I'm not sure I'll can any this year as we still have quite a bit on our pantry shelves but I will likely give some away and make some friends.