Garden Harvest June 2013

One of our larger cucumber harvests.  We harvest about 1-2 daily, though it is slowing down.

One of our MANY harvests of potatoes.

More harvest, we used all of this for the family Father's Day dinner. We brought steamed green beans, steamed carrots, and 2 kinds of mashed potatoes.  I made a batch that had sour cream and chives (from the garden) and then garlic (from the garden) and rosemary potatoes.

Towards the end of June our potato plants we're not looking so great. We ended up doing a final harvest.  We gave lots to family and friends but still have several we need to finish soon!

So what we thought were melons actually turned out to be pumpkins! 

We harvested the sunflower just a week ago and processed the seeds and now have yummy sunflower seeds to snack on.

Our watermelons. We now have I think 7 or 8 of them growing on their vines.

Our 1 peach, it was surprisingly tasty though technically I don't think we were suppose to get any peaches yet. It's like our blueberry bushes.  We thought it would be at least a year or two until we got any harvest but we've had blueberry muffins TWICE already (If you want I found an AMAZING blueberry recipe). And have harvested a total of 3- 3 1/2 cups of blueberries and still have plenty ripening still.

Our one blackberry.  We've actually been able to collect a bunch from a park that's near us and have been able to enjoy banana bread with blackberries and a blackberry cobbler. We've had them for out treat for FHE the last few Mondays.

We also canned some pickles.  Here I am filling the sliced cucumbers in mason jars with brine.

We did two varieties.  The taller mason jars are your regular dill and the small one in the middle has jalapenos added to make spicy dill pickles.  We haven't tried them yet, you have to wait at least 3 weeks.  I'll let you know if they are any good.

Sanitizing and heating the lids.

Placing the jars in the boiling water.

All in!

Our finished product.  We're excited to see how they taste!

Our garden how it was.

Beautiful pumpkin.

We had to harvest our pumpkins early because vine borers and squash bugs had taken over.  Luckily, pumpkins can ripen off the vine.  We let them sit out in the sun for a little over a week.  I processed them all and ended up with close to 20 cups of pureed pumpkin. I ended up freezing close to 8 cups of it. We didn't have room to freeze it all. So I used some of it to make 6 pumpkin pies and 2 pumpkin rolls. It's been so fun to use things from our garden!  It has been an great hobby we as a family have come to enjoy.