Harvest time and canning

tomatoes and potatoes After the initial bumper crop of lettuce, zucchini and yellow squash, we are finally reaching the point of harvesting our other veggies (and sugar baby watermelons).

We have been really pleased with the tomatoes. Three of the plants have really taken off, and we’re expecting at least 100 tomatoes before the season ends. We planted Celebrity Hybrids from seed and the fruits are deep red, firm and solid almost all the way through (I am not a fan of the watery goosh in tomatoes, so I am especially pleased about that last part). We made homemade salsa with the tomatoes yesterday and it was delicious! We plan to can some as well.

The potatoes are also a nice surprise. We simply planted baby yukon gold potatoes that we had purchased in the produce section at the supermarket. We let them grow eyes and planted them whole. The ones pictured are the result of a single seed potato.

onions Elsewhere in the garden, the onions and beets are growing quite well. The dark green sugar baby watermelons have produced sweet, juicy rewards. The carrots grew masses of fingers in the hard clay soil, as expected, but we hope this year’s work will help break up that soil for straighter carrots next year. (We will power till again before the spring planting.)

The peppers were supposed to be red bell peppers, but they are growing long and lean, more like a hot pepper. We do have an Anaheim pepper plant in another section of the garden and we’re wondering if somehow they were cross-pollinated. We haven’t tasted them yet, so I will let you know if they have any heat. peppers Harvest time and canning

Last, but not least, we are trying our hands at canning our hard-won harvest.

My husband bought the mother of all pressure cookers (I’ll share a photo in another blog) and he’s been canning everything from smoked beans to roasted peppers. He showed me the process when we canned a large box of peaches we picked up in Palisade, Colo. (if you have never eaten a fresh Palisade peach in August, you have not lived), and he made the zucchini/yellow squash pickles canned squash and canned peaches pictured.