In the Garden Year 1 – late July and August

July 17, 2019

We are having lots of fun in the garden! Everything comes at once and the picking, cooking, and preserving are a part time job! We’ve stocked the freezer with zucchini cookies, tons of berries for smoothies, super healthy popsicles, mulberry jam, jars of pesto and jars of blanched green beans. We’ve been eating lots of salads, jars of salsa, Swiss chard and spinach, peppers (a few red, still mostly green), zucchini, pea pods, cauliflower, broccoli and kale. By August the tomatoes started to come and we’ve eaten them like crazy. I made bruschetta, many many veggie plates, 3 pans of lasagna with homemade tomato sauce, as well as a couple homemade pizza nights with extra sauce for the freezer.

On rainy cooler days, I’ve made a huge pot of chili with all fresh tomatoes and another of tomato soup with grilled cheese. Carrot hummus, red pepper hummus, roasted tomato hummus are in the fridge and in the freezer. Blt’s and many veggie sandwiches have been our lunches. I’ve shredded zucchini into muffins and pancakes and carrots into birthday cupcakes. The broccoli never stops regrowing when you cut it and I’ve made broccoli cheddar soup and ham and broccoli mac and cheese. We have more cucumbers and kale than we can eat and I’ve bagged and frozen kale and refrigerator pickled jars of giardinera. The bees are everywhere and we’ve been visited by butterflies, hummingbirds, and built our own fairy garden.

As the season fades the pumpkins are so much fun and we’ve eaten one of them so far, delicious when roasted and mashed with the leftovers going into muffins. We’re getting tons and tons of cantaloupe which are only growing to be baseball to softball size before detaching from the stem. At first I thought these were a total fail, but then we started cutting them up and eating them anyway and it turns out the are a perfect kid-friendly size.

I don’t think we’ve ever eaten so healthy, but it’s all we can do to keep up. The garden has been my summer happy place. Here I am, writing this in September, and I’m watching it still churn out plenty, but also begin its wind down to fall. It has been a great learning experience for the kids and for me and I’m already thinking of what we will grow next year.