Garden Heartvests

The tomato plant that Nicole gave me has been giving me tomatoes en masse!!!

We also got cucumbers and squash!

Do you see that bent cucumber in the middle?  It was sooooooo good. It tasted buttery!  I guess I saved some sort of seeds from ones that I bought, maybe an English cucumber? Sadly, we only got 2 of those, but they were the best!

Some of my larger tomatoes made for great caprese salads!

We have gotten so much basil from our indoor plants! I keep drying it, using the microwave, and adding it to jars, but thought I'd try a round the old-fashioned way!

I think maybe we ate the missing part of the heart before I could snap a photo, which is why this heartvest has a large gap?

I trades some of our tomato and squash bounty with Kristy for some zucchini and eggs!  Talk about living the dream!

This deer here likes to snack on my garden!

Lots and lots of tomatoes.  And the end of the peas.

New this year: corn!  Only two of my stalks actually produced, but we got three ears that I hand fertilized (in case the wind and rain didn't quite make it.) 

Alice and Grace enjoyed the first two, and Billy had laid claim to the third, but when we went out to check on it, some creature (see above) had pulled it off the stalk and it was on the ground. = (  

I tried to collect all the tomatoes at the bottom of this heart, but Grace thought they looked better spread out haphazardly, and who am I to argue?

I thought my pumpkin plant was going to skip out on the pumpkins this year (despite taking over the ground bed) but last week I spied a large green pumpkin!!!

Getting really close to the end of the season, but really enjoying all of these tasty tomatoes!

One more big haul today! There were many unripened ones still, and the tomato plants still have flowers!!!!

It's been a lovely season, though I didn't spend as much time in my garden this summer as I had hoped, but the plants grew and produced none-the-less!

later days

Crafting and Cooking

We'll kick off the post with the baklava that Emily made!  It was quite tasty!  She's been in the mood to make some more, I just need to get her the supplies. ; )

Kristy gave us (a second round of) huge zucchinis, so I got to work on them!

First off was cutting one of them up for the dehydrator.  I used 4 from her this summer and have maybe 2 cups of flour to show for it?

The second one I shredded and made 2 loaves of zucchini bread.  Neither of which I took an end product for.  If I'm offered a late season one, I'll made on more batch and be sure to take a picture to add to this post!

I saw this cool hack that you can put these freezer pops in a vacuum sealed cup or water bottle and take them to the beach or on a trip for a cool treat! Well, when I packed them up, we ended up spending the ice cream money that Avia gave us at the end of our adventure, and never got to them.

I wasn't quite ready to part with the water bottle, and so I started bringing the twins freezer pops for our afternoon walks home from school!  I bring three, one for each of them, and just over halfway home there is a public trash can.  Once their first one is gone, we cut the third in half, which lasts them the perfect amount until we are home!  So far, I've only forgotten once!

Grace wanted to use food dye to make a rainbow cupcake desert for our most recent game day with the Cornishes.  I feel like we eat plenty of dye without adding more into our diet, so I asked her if she could maybe use fruit, or other food instead.  She did a beautiful job, and it looked so colorful!

I made some coconut cookies.  They touted only being 3 ingredients, but the comments added egg and flour, which made them quite good!  I added chocolate chips to some of them, and it turns out that was also a good move. lol.

I made another round of squash soup with some of our bounty!

Just as good as last year!

Grace showing off our blended, ground, and milled zucchini flour!

Grace found a super cute pea pod stuffie on the internet.  She wanted to save money to buy it, but I was able to convince her to try and make one instead.  It came out so cute!!!

Her inspo: 

Loving this season of the year and of life!

later days

Garden Update

While Sarah was gone, I took pictures of her garden each time I went by, just so that she could see her happy plants.

I can't see much of my garden from inside, but I enjoy looking at what I can see!

I thought that a strong wind had ripped off the top section of one my pea plants. = (  However, when I went out a few days later, when there hadn't been any wind, it too was missing!  I know there's a bunny, and chippunk and some birds, but the entire top of the vine was gone!

Then, one of my friends sent me this picture of our backyard that she took while walking her dog one morning!!!  Punk deer eating my plants!

Small green tomatoes!

Onion plants are huge!!!

We have wild strawberries all over the yard in June, this one was big and bright against the gutter.

Something in the mulch smelled awful, like sour milk or dead animal.  Then this yellow powder appeared in the front bed.  Once it disappeared so did the smell.  Very weird!

The plant recovered and started making new peas!

I left these on the vine to ripen a little more, but when I went to check on them the following day, guess who got to them first! That's right, punk deer.

So, the next ripened tomatoes, I collected a little earlier, so that the deer wouldn't get them first!  Not enough for a heartvest, but a happy harvest.

Our first cucumber! 

 Sadly, by the time I returned from Oklahoma it was overripe and yellowing. = (  I still collected it, as well as our first squash!

This squash had a very thick skin!  It wasn't inedible, but was tough.

Pan fried!

 I made some squash bread afterwards to sop up some of the excess butter, and it went fast!

We have some lettuce out there and lots of tomatoes incoming!  The corn is looking kind of short considering we are past July 4th, We'll see what happens!

Now that I'm back, and the party is over, the water regimen should be a little more regular.

later days