End of Summer Harvest

Sorry to be MIA for a while! Our garden has been quite fruitful this summer! The pictures below are what we brought in the house just TODAY! From left to right, there are green bell peppers, jalapenos, tomatoes, and that huge pile of leaves... BASIL!! I'll be taking quite a few bell peppers to work tomorrow to share. I think we're going to make some more pesto this week and try to dry the basil in the oven.

We also dug up our potatoes today! Jeff planted them in the spring and their flowers just started to die off (which is the signal they are ready). They are a lot smaller than we thought they'd be. I'm going to figure out how to blanch and freeze them.

We have had probably over one hundred jalapenos this summer, easily! I've frozen most of them, but we made some yummy jalapeno poppers a couple times. I also got up enough courage to make hot pepper jelly and can it this weekend! We tried some today and, I think for a first attempt, it turned out well!

We've also made salsa, spaghetti sauce, and stuffed peppers with our home-grown vegetables. We've frozen the spaghetti sauce, but now that I am more comfortable canning, I'll do more of that next year.

Today we cleaned out part of the garden to get ready to put in the fall garden. We'll put in most of what we planted in the spring again.