I did not intend to be gone for so long.  I had to take off two weeks for the Grimes County Fair and all the events before and after that required so much of my attention.  Then the house, yard, and garden had been neglected for at least a week.  It took forever to get on top of my housework, yard work, and the garden.

The garden was the hardest to get back under control.  The tomatoes have gone crazy.  The squash died.  The peppers were producing in force.  Our potatoes needed to be pulled up.  Weeds were also growing like mad.

Usually I find harvesting to be the most rewarding part of gardening.  Literally  eating the fruits of your labor gives you a sense of accomplishment.  But, sometimes you harvest so much that the quantity of vegetables is overwhelming.

You don’t want to waste your produce.  You have worked too hard for that.  You give away what you can, but most of it you want to put up for the rest of the year.  I love to make things with my vegetables or can or freeze them so that I can enjoy them year round.

First, I made pickles.  I made dill and bread and butter pickles both in spears and in slices.  My son ,Jake, and I put up 12 quarts of pickles.  That will be one quart of pickles a month for the rest of the year.  I don’t know about your family, but that sounds about right for us.

Then, I made salsa with my fresh tomatoes, jalapenos, and green peppers.  I added onion and cilantro from the store.  One of the perks of making your own foods is that you get to customize your goods.  The salsa recipe that I was following was making chunky salsa.  My husband prefers the restaurant-style salsa that is very liquid.  He dislikes chunks of tomatoes.  So, after the salsa had cooked together the correct amount of time.  I took my hand-held blender to the mixture in order to make my salsa the correct consistency for my husband.

Lane is very pleased with the salsa.  Actually he is impressed that it tastes so good and that most of the ingredients came from our farm.  When he tried it out for the first time with tortilla chips, he said, “Move over La Casita!”  I could not have been more pleased since La Casita is an awesome Tex-Mex restaurant in Navasota.

I canned 6 quarts of crushed tomatoes, which I use throughout the year making sauces, adding to soups, or putting in chili.  Tomatoes had always intimidated me with the additional step of peeling, but I did it and realized that tomatoes are not so hard to can.

Plums are ripe, too.  We have been eating so many I was surprised when I still had enough to give away and make 12 pints of plum jam.  I cannot wait to tell you  how I did it later this week.  It tastes out of this world.  I am so excited.

Today is my daughter’s 11th birthday.  I have to make her a gluten-free chocolate cake.  I am happy to be back to writing.  I hope that you are too.  Wednesday I will write about plum jam and on Friday I will let you know how my children did at the fair.

To everyone who ordered my Texas Homesteader Wheat-Free Cookbook during the sale, I want to sincerely thank you.  Thank you for not only supporting my book, but for supporting me.

Tags: canning, Gardening, Grimes County Fair, pickles, plum jam, salsa, Texas Homesteader Wheat-Free Cookbook, tomatoes

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 7:56 am and is filed under Gardening, Homesteading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.