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.
People with rural backgrounds are back to preserving. It forever surprises me. Not that I have anything against it, but I just don't have people in my life who do that. In fact, I never have known people like that.
ReplyDeleteThat's fair. I don't know a lot of people who do preservations of garden produce but most of the ones I do know are like me, coming from a farming background with parents who raised large gardens and canned excesses. After I left home, I had no desire to ever take up gardening or preserving until after I got married and it just felt like the right time to start.
DeleteYou've got a pretty good haul there! I'm glad you can preserve it all! We didn't try any food this year (we seldom do) and based on what I've heard from other gardeners it appears that was a wise decision, given our weather.
ReplyDeleteI've spent most of my life in the same climate zone so I guess you could say, I'm a subject matter expert on what I can grow here and what I can't though I still have flops and do experimentation. (This year I am trying to grow garbanzo beans for the first time.) If I suddenly transported myself to your neck of the woods, I would have no idea of what I could try growing or not.
DeleteYum, yum!!!
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to beat eating something you had a hand in creating.
DeleteWhat pretty jars! I just came in from checking our tomatoes...they are heavy with tomatoes and when they all ripen I will have to freeze some cause I don't have that many friends:)
ReplyDeleteIn real time, our six plants are producing about a 3 gallon bucket of ripe tomatoes a week now. Fortunately, I've developed quite a network of people who will gladly take tomatoes so this year, even though I didn't need any myself other than some for fresh eating, so they haven't been hard to get rid of them. In fact, I am schedules out for about the next month.
DeleteI loved pickled things, but only dill or tangy; I'm not into sweet at all. One time at Xmas, my mother-in-law had some delicious looking pickles so I bit into one and it was sweet. I would have liked a photo of my face. :) That's quite a garden bounty!
ReplyDeleteI don't eat a lot of sweet pickles other than on burgers or hotdogs and I don't eat a lot of those. Probably more get eaten by guests or given away as gifts by us.
DeleteA wonderful harvest and great way of using it up!
ReplyDeleteBecause we have limited garden space, we tend to preserve two or three years worth of everything so that we can plant something different every year. For example, our dried bean inventory is getting low so next year, I'll plant several rows of that and no cucumbers and probably only one shishito pepper plant for fresh eating. The last time I preserved any cucumbers was back in 2023.
DeleteBeing raised in Oklahoma, I suggest ya gotta deep fry that okra in corn meal breading! My Dad and Aunt had a competition at the end of the season as to who made the best pickled okra.Talk 'O Texas brand in jars is the closest I can get now. Linda in Kansas
ReplyDeleteI've had plenty of fried okra but in the interest of health, I try to limit my intake of it these days.
DeleteJars of home canned produce are always so satisfying to see. I tried a new variety of cucumber this year, but it didn't produce well. Fortunately, I do have several years worth of the kinds of pickled items we like. It's good planning and preparation for the lean years.
ReplyDeleteOur cucumber crops of the past have been really hit or miss. This year has been perhaps the best year of my life with them. Every time I think I have picked the last of them and they are on their way out, I go out three days later and pick another basket of them. I'm having a hard time giving them away at this point as everyone around us is cucumbered out. Too bad I couldn't keep them fresh for a long time.
DeleteLooks good Ed!
ReplyDeleteBased on my gifted onion harvest this year, I am starting to look at ways to preserve/store/pickle them.
I have never preserved onions other than curing them in my garage and then using them before they go bad. I guess some do get preserved in salsa and sweet pickles.
DeleteBeautiful, Ed. Enjoy your bountiful harvest!
ReplyDeleteI already am!
DeleteLove the bounty from your garden, Ed. Yes! Our detached garage smelled gloriously of garlic in late June through early July. I took pictures, and hopefully before autumn I'll get around to making a post about it. I love growing garlic. I have plans (and seeds) to try growing onions next year.
ReplyDelete