More harvesting

I ended up canning the peaches on Tuesday; I got 12 quarts. Saturday I bought another 1/2 bushel, which I'll probably can tonight; it will give us another 12 quarts. That will give us 23 quarts for the year. I know, the math doesn't add up :) One quart didn't seal, so we are in the process of eating it. Even our failures are good eating... By the way, I use a light syrup in canning them; I tried no syrup one time and they were inedible :( My recipe is one part sugar to two parts water. Anybody have a different ratio? How did it taste? We also use unrefined sugar, which has a richer flavor; it looks better, too.

I made 30 pints of tomato soup last week, so now all I need is to stew some tomatoes. At the rate they are producing, I'll have about 3 times what I need. I guess we'll be eating a lot of fresh tomatoes! We had fresh tomatoes on our pizza last night, 3 Romas, but that barely made a dent in them. Last year, I froze a lot of the Roma; maybe I should do that again.

The beans are slowing down again. I'm thinking I will pull the ones in the greenhouse area in preparation for planting winter crops there. The top will probably go back on in early October. Not sure what I'm going to try to overwinter yet.

The cucumbers are about gone. My second planting got destroyed by the heat; I only got two cucumbers out the whole planting. Too late for another planting this year, although it is tempting to see if the hoop house would protect them enough...we'll see.

I finished canning the apple sauce on Sunday. I ended up with about 12 quarts, 36 pints, 24 half pints, and 39 4-ounce jars. What can I say, I ran out of pints and quarts! Also, the 4 ounce jars are perfect for my lunch and we had 3 dozen empties. I'm not sure how we ended up with that many, but there they were.

I'm hoping to plant some more stuff this week for fall harvest, but we'll see how it goes. I would also like to get my garlic planted for next year. You plant garlic in early fall/late summer for harvest the following year. I've never grown it before, so this is an experiment.

The potatoes are looking good. I managed to harvest a few this weekend, and they sure tasted good baked. They are a red potato, but very light. This is another experiment; I planted them in straw, which theoretically makes them easier to harvest. They also are a lot cleaner :)

So, how about you others? Is your garden doing ok?