Summer garden

We have a garden again this summer and it has been great.

I wrote back a bit about my herb garden and the things we have planted.  Here we are a month later and I thought I'd update.  But no pictures.  I've been rather lazy about the camera lately and my computer isn't reading my camera's card.

I've made three kinds of jelly this season:  watermelon jelly, clover jelly and chamomile jelly.  The clover was made from the billions of clover flowers growing right here in my own yard.  The chamomile was made from the chamomile flowers in my herb garden.  (I bought the watermelon)

The clover jelly is a light golden brown and was so delicious.
The chamomile jelly is almost clear, but with the lightest hint of golden color.  It's lovely, but I haven't tried any yet.
The watermelon jelly (more like a jam really, as it has some texture) is the loveliest pink.  It is tasty, but a little odd to taste watermelon in jelly form.

The funny thing is, I'm not a big jelly eater, but I love making the jelly.  Once we make it through this jar of watermelon, we'll open a chamomile next. 

Our garden has about 20 tomato plants.  Every plant has several tomatoes, and they are just now starting to turn red.  I picked four yesterday.  We didn't plant cucumbers, but we've had two volunteer plants come up and they are producing beautiful cucumbers.  I've picked four of those.  I'm not planning on picking this year.  We've still got about 80 quarts of pickles from last summer.

We have one strawberry plant that has produced 3 strawberries.  They are kind of little, sad, withered things, but I hear it takes a year and a half for them to really get established. 

So, this is our gardening/preservatives successes so far for the year.  I'm looking forward to more as the summer continues.  With the many tomatoes I hope we will get, I'll make the Hubby a lot of salsa and I will try my hand at tomato sauce for pasta.