Let the canning begin!

I was very busy today.  I canned 2 jars of salsa from our homegrown tomatoes!  The funny thing is, I can't stand the touch or smell of any of the ingredients.  I don't like the texture of tomatoes and my eyes are still burning from the two onions I chopped, even though it has been more than 12 hours since I made the salsa.  However, I do like the smell of the cilantro I used.  The cilantro was grown in my herb garden.

I mentioned we had  two cucumber plants come up on their own this year.  They have produced at least 10 beautiful cucumbers and they aren't done.  This picture is from last week, when we first started harvesting from the garden.  There are also some pea pods.  Hubby cooked and ate those today.

We still have a ton of pickles that I made last year, but I didn't want this years cucumbers to go to waste, so I tried a new recipe tonight and made crispy refrigerator pickles.  They are cucumbers, garlic, dill, lemon juice and cold water.  We'll see how those turn out...

This is the jelly.  You can see the lovely colors.  The pink one is, of course, watermelon jelly.  The second is cover jelly and the third small jar is chamomile jelly.  Aren't they lovely?

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.

The herb garden

The herb garden!
Did you know chives put out purple flowers?  Neither did I, but they do!

Chamomile Flowers:

Last year I had almost no chamomile flowers and my parsley was only about three inches high.  This year is very different.  That's Chamomile and parsley next to each other in the picture below.  Since taking this picture a two weeks ago, they have both doubled in height.

Mint!  I've got peppermint, spearmint and chocolate mint growing.  The smell is lovely.  Also in this picture is cinnamon basil and lemon thyme.  It's not a great picture, but as you can see, everything is doing wonderfully well this year.

Next post:  The Backyard Garden...

To kill a plant

I never knew that mint plants came in so many flavors.  There is mint, spearmint, peppermint, chocolate mint, candy mint and more.  I bought a candy mint and fell in love with it's smell.  It wasn't the best looking mint plant, but I couldn't resist the smell.  I kept it on the back patio with my other potted plants.  It did fine, but not too healthy.  I watered it good and stuck it on the front porch.  The candy mint was very happy there and it became nice and green.

Then we had that dumb heat wave and power outage (which for us included water outage.)  The plants did not get watered.  The candy mint fried in the sun and died.  I put it back on the back porch and left it there.  It was a black bit of plant.  Sad and dead.  I couldn't throw it out.  So, it sat for several weeks, dead as a doornail on the back porch.  It sat through several rain storms.

This weekend, I noticed a little shoot of green was coming up from the candy mint plant.  I figured it was a weed that had managed to plant itself into the pot.  I picked up the pot and looked at the little plant.  It looked like the candy mint.  I gingerly touched its leaves and smelt my finger - mint!  The candy mint came back to life!

It is now in my house, sitting in a cool, but sunny place and it is growing again.  I pruned away most of the dead plant and the candy mint is once again growing.  I won't kill it again.  I promise.

The dead candy mint and the tiny sprout of new green mint.
It's ALIVE!

Flowers on the Move

Our garden among the rocks was quite successful this year.

We had about 50 onion plants.  My hubby loves onions, but even that was a lot for him.  He made a lot of French Onion soup and put onions on just about anything he could.  We ended up freezing a lot and we dehydrated and froze the rest. 

Our one little strawberry plant produced four strawberries.  They were little, but so good.  After we removed the rest of the plants that were sharing the bucket with the strawberries, they just started to spread.  They are still alive and well and we will care for them over the winter so they can begin again next spring.

We also had a few small planters with flowers in them.  They were the only color around our house.  We had them away from the rest of the garden and put them on our front porch.  They did fantastic and we had lovely blooms all summer.

In August, I noticed something unusual; we had flowers blooming in the rocks next to the porch.  Somehow, the flowers had spread.  They left the fertile plant box and have thrived in the rocks.   I’m so pleased with our little garden we had this year.

The flowers migrated from their box and into the rocks.

How does your garden grow?

Good golly Miss Molly
Whose laugh is so jolly,
How does your garden grow?

With potatoes in pails
And strawberries that fail
And sweet onions all in a row.

The garden at the beginning of April:

How it's looking today:

Lots of onions!

Potatoes and Onions

You get creative in the desert.