23 September 2015

My raspberry bushes are in full production mode and we are picking lots and lots of berries.  Nut Brown and Bobo are always ready to help me.  The other day we were out there picking and I said to Bobo, "Will you put these in the bowl for me?" He looked at me and said, "No.  Can I still have them?"  What the kids don't eat, I freeze, but so far there has been more consumption than freezing.

This summer was a good one for the garden.  We ate lots and lots of cucumbers, zucchini and green beans, lots of peas (which I also froze), and now we're getting into raspberries, tomatoes and peppers.  We  borrowed a food dryer to freeze the massive crop of serranos I'm getting - there's no way we're going to eat them all right now.  The poblanos are pretty much being eaten as they ripen.  I planted San Marzano tomatoes this year, which are 'sauce tomatoes', with the idea that whatever we didn't eat we could cook down into tomato sauce and freeze.  So far we're eating them, but the bush is seriously loaded and we'll probably run out of steam before we eat through all of them.  Oh- also we've had several cabbages, and we're eating our way through the last of the onions.  I spent less that $5 on onion starts and ended up with more than ten pounds of our favorite kind of onions.  Very gratifying.

It wasn't all good- I planted kale, which turned rotten and buggy.  It was truly, truly nasty.  The broccoli was also a disappointment, and I also planted radishes and discovered that nobody really likes them from the garden.  The lettuce only kind of worked out, so I won't be planting that again next year.  Still learning- but we did get so much that we enjoyed eating this year, it was very rewarding.