It's Growing:)

With the recent warm weather you can almost hear the garden growing :)

We feel so blessed how great the garden looks. After the rough spring we weren't sure if we would have any produce. But right now it's looking like we will have lots of veggies!

Here are our peppers. We use peppers for salads and for making salsa.

This is one of the two apple trees we have in the garden. It is loaded with apples this year.

They are young trees so this will be the first year we will have such a good crop.

We use our apples for eating fresh, making apple pies and freezing for applesauce or desserts.

Our raspberries aren't the greatest this year. With all the rain a whole bunch of new growth came and kind of choked out the actual fruit bearing plants. You kind of have to dig through the new growth to find the raspberries!  We use raspberries for jam and freeze them to make desserts or more jam if we run out. But mostly we eat them fresh!

These are our onions. We have eaten a couple already. We won't have enough to last us for the year but it will be a start!

Our peas are beautiful this year. The only problem is only about half of them came up!

We eat our first couple of pickings fresh and then blanche and freeze the rest for winter meals.

So glad I don't have to buy lettuce for awhile. We are big salad eaters so we go through a lot of lettuce. 

This is Romaine Lettuce. I started growing this a few years ago and it is my favorite. When it first comes up we just pick the leaves and eat them. Then as the season goes on and we can't keep up we let them grow into heads. The great thing about lettuce is you can pick off the leaves and it grows back and you can have fresh lettuce for a long time....most of the season... unless the weather gets too hot and dry, then it starts to taste bitter. Too bad you can't  freeze lettuce :)

These cucumbers are almost at pickling stage. We grow two kinds of cucumbers. The long english kind are mostly what we eat fresh and with the pickling...we make pickles!!!

Our favorite pickles are Cafe pickles and Alberta Dill. We also load up on relish....sometimes enough for a few years...right Megan?

Here is sweet Nathan hoeing our potatoes. The potatoes are doing great and looks like we will have plenty! That's good cause we go through LOTS of potatoes. We have a root cellar that we store our potatoes in for the winter. We take them out of the ground as late as possible, store them in our root cellar and we usually have potatoes until spring. 

Here's the second planting of corn. Out of our first planting only 4 plants came up. We will probably not have enough corn to bring us through the winter this year, but at least we will be able to have lots fresh on the cob! The corn that we don't eat fresh we will blanche and freeze. 

Here's the tomatoes. I have been busy pruning them so the plants will put their energy into growing tomatoes rather than more leaves. Still some of them insist on being big and bushy!!! 

The last couple of years we have hardly had any good tomatoes so I am hoping for a bumper crop this year. We grew 3 kinds of tomatoes, 2 kinds we started from seed and the other ones we bought at a greenhouse. Two of the kinds are normal size and the other kind is a tiny kind. We will eat as many fresh tomatoes as we can (my mouth waters thinking of tomatoe toasted sandwiches!) and with the rest we will make salsa, pasta sauce and the rest we will can for soups and other things. If we get ambitious we might even can some tomatoe soup. 

It won't be long and we will be canning and freezing veggies like silly!!!!

Can't wait :)