From Garden to Table

Late July & early August days are some of the busiest garden days of the season here in New Hampshire.  It seems that all the hard work we've put in isn't quite over yet and many of the crops are ready for harvesting.  So much of my time this week was devoted to weeding, harvesting, cooking & canning - days that left my feet a bit numb and sore by nightfall.  But until that moment when I actually sit down, I'm in the zone, the garden zone that is, and I truly enjoy every minute I spend out there.  

Last week we harvested cucumbers (still many more to come) and I began the pickling season.

This year I chose a new canning recipe for pickling from my favorite cooking blog - Smitten Kitchen's Bread & Butter Pickles    I did make a few changes to the recipe to suit our taste and I processed the pickles in the hot water canner so that the pickles can be kept for winter storage. The remainder of cucumbers picked in the next few weeks will be our usual garlic dill pickles, so this will give us half and half, quite a nice change I think.

 I'll let you know how it turns out when we open the first jar in a few weeks.  

      Carrots & radishes for us, carrot & radish tops for the chickens

Early apples from a friends apple tree, we traded cucumbers & dried dill from our garden so she could make some pickles for this lovely basket of apples - a good trade I think!  Tart and crunchy such a treat since apples aren't usually done until early September.

Sunflowers from our garden make for such a happy table - don't they? 

We're eating tomatoes every day now - sweet and juicy - after a winter without home grown tomatoes - the taste is even better than I remember.  The perfect snack while weeding. 

And, of course, the summer onslaught of baseball bat sized (well almost) zucchini has begun!  Now, I love zucchini & squash, but while driving around last weekend we actually saw someone with a cooler full of zucchini at the end of their driveway with a giant FREE sign in front of it.  Since our yellow squash aren't quite ready, we naturally helped the gentleman out with his dilemma... he insisted that we take more... he had had enough of summer squash and zucchinni

The peppers are from out garden but the summer squash are from the "free" house - can you believe he actually wanted to get rid of these? 

Naturally they were turned into dinner, stuffed zucchini, 2 halves eaten that night, and 4 frozen for dinner on one of those "I really don't feel like cooking" nights.  

The leftover zucchini pulp along with 2 smaller ones from our garden were turned into our favorite whole wheat zucchini bread with pecans and coconut - again 1 loaf eaten, 2 in the freezer.  I think the whole week was filled with garden work that graced our table each evening.   Fortunately I have a husband that arrives home to see my dirt caked hands, feet & clothes and is so understanding about the house being in shambles - I think he really enjoys the fresh picked food, too :-)  And because I can be a bit of a non-stop worker when I'm in my gardening zone, he is great at reminding me to stop working and get out on the boat now and again for a post-dinner sunset cruise.  

  For me, actually for all of us, that's a good thing.