garden catch up part 1

I think the easiest way to get caught up at this point is a few posts. This will be the first in a series of what I will call "garden catch up"! Oy vey, where did the summer go???  Doesn't everyone say that at he end of every season?  I know I do.

So, we'll start with the veggie garden. This was so much fun and I learned so much.  I should also mention this was my first real garden so I really had no idea what I was doing. I did a lot of googling, a lot of question asking, reading, etc. to get where I did with my garden.  

Some things I thought going into this: I would have bumper crops of things and be able to can as I went. I did have bumper crops of patty pan squash, which are the cute yellow squash above.  But, my cucumbers were kind of more of a slow steady trickle.  My tomatoes did not really ripen. Green beans pooped out.  And zucchini?  Welp, I am still the only person who doesn't grow an abundance.

 But!  As you can see I did get things canned.  I realized that I could just do small batches of pickles as I had the cukes.  Luckily I was able to find fresh dill at the grocery store in big bouquet form since my dill did not even come up.  I also was able to make strawberry rhubarb jam with rhubarb from my plant in the front yard.  A coworker of mine gave me a big box of tomatoes from her garden that she couldn't use and I made a bunch of canned salsa, which was a first for me.

My spaghetti squash, pictured above, did really well - I think I got about 5 very, very large squash from one plant.  

This past week was the first frost and everything died.  Well, except for a couple leaves on a couple of my zucchini plants which have a couple very small squash so I'm leaving them be for the time being.

I've started a little list of what I need to do differently next year, how I want to rearrange things, what plants I want to do again, add to, etc.  I had a great time with this garden and will definitely do another next year!

Some canning stats:

10 jars of salsa

8 jars of strawberry rhubarb jam

8 jars of dill pickles