Summer if over, and I haven't blogged much about gardening this year.
We had a prolific year. I had more cucumbers than I needed. We ate them as salad every day. I use equal parts of mayo and sour cream and sprinkle in a little sugar and a little more garlic powder. I have a lot of pickles left over from last year, so I only made as many as I though we would need besides those, and we pulled up most of the vines. Our tomatoes, too, did really well. I made 60 pints of tomato soup and 50 quarts of juice. I canned and froze two lugs of peaches. We also put away 101 quarts of corn in three sessions. I am out of jars. Usually, I put tomatoes in the freezer and when I want juice I take out an ice cream bucket of frozen tomatoes and make some. The freezer this year is full of chickens, beef and deer. We need to be having some company to help us eat it. Both of us eat less than we used to.
In the flower garden realm, I am feeling a real lack of interest in doing any more weeding or cleaning up, so I haven't. I'm also very disappointed in the petunias I planted in my big flower garden. I don't know whether it's the soil or the shade. I think pinks do better.
Next year I want to budget enough to go hog-wild on bedding plants and crowd them in, since they don't seem to spread, just hang on.
I'm glad Jim likes to do the gardening. I don't do very much picking, but as the tomatoes and beans come on, I usually help.
Our peppers are all in the freezer, and so is the okra. Jim forgot about planting beans until the summer was half over, so when he planted them, they took forever to get going and we picked a few now and then and then ignored them. A week ago, those bean plants were burgeoning with beans. We picked them and it was such a tiring job, that we pulled up 2/3 of them, intending to pick the ones left to eat. We haven't. I put 7 quarts in the freezer.
