Abundance

Summer is definitely here! The yard is producing food very well this year. Enough to keep us plenty busy and fairly fed.



This picture is some of the food we worked with today and will work with some more tomorrow. (I will work on my food arranging skills to make it prettier for pictures in the future. One skill at a time, one skill at a time. )

The sweet cherries came from the church orchard. (We only got about 15 cherries from our little trees this year.) The kids and I canned 15 quarts, froze 1 gallon, ate about a million and still have two bowls full in the fridge. I turned the back patio into an outdoor canning kitchen with my camp chef and my two folding tables. It turned out great! Much better than I had imagined it would.
The peas are very fat and plentiful. I don't like to preserve peas - way too much work - so we try to only plant what the kids will eat as snacks while they are playing in the yard. We must have over planted a bit this year.
The broccoli is on it's way out of season, this is the last of it. I am going to make that very yummy broccoli sunshine salad tomorrow - you know the one with bacon and raisins. My favorite!
The purple cabbage is my very best cabbage yet! I have been trying for six years now to grow cabbage. Now I just have to figure out how I like to eat cabbage.
Every year for the past seven years I have tried wacky ideas to grow potatoes. We call it "The Great Potato Experiment." I've never had much luck. This year I gave up and vowed not to grow any potatoes. Then last year's potatoes started growing in Randy's and Robyn's gardens so I decided to dig them up and stick them in where my cauliflower plants had died. I transplanted them and ignored them. I guess potatoes like to be ignored. I thought one plant was dead so I pulled it out and found all these potatoes. I am thinking of turning them into potato salad tomorrow. I will also steam a few with some of those peas and a little sprig of rosemary. So yummy!
The other bowl is my sour dough. I made sour dough pancakes for breakfast and sour dough pizza for lunch. This sour dough was supposed to be bread for dinner, but I was busy with the cherries so I fed it again and we will see what it becomes tomorrow. I am thinking of trying sour dough corn bread. Fun stuff!

I really like food.