Yesterday Attila and I headed out at 7:45 a.m. to visit local commercial pick-your-own strawberry fields. The farm was finally open. We weren’t the first ones there, but we were the first ones to emerge from the field with our baskets full with six litres of fresh strawberries.
Last night our dinner consisted of a Dutch Baby pancake, topped with fresh strawberries, it was delicious.
Yesterday Attila finished planting the last of his plant starts into the soil. It is a big job, he planted hundreds of plants over the last few weeks. Now it will be all about weeding and watering, until harvest time.
All the plants in our garden this year are either started from seed, from cuttings, or by dividing roots. Many of these seeds were gathered from our garden in previous years. Most of our financial investment in the garden this season has been on infrastructure. We purchased more t-posts, remesh, and fine grid chicken wire, all for fencing. Also purchased were additional hoops to cover our brassicas, and cucumbers.
I feel fortunate that Attila loves to garden, as I’ve said many times, it is a hobby with benefits. He started small, even before we moved here almost eight years ago. Each year he has slowly expanded the garden, learning what works here, and what does not work here, along the way. We eat fresh, or preserve, every bit of food he produces.
Today Attila picked three and a half pounds of rhubarb from the garden, which was used along with diced strawberries and apples, to can Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Filling. The first batch yielded only 4 500-ml jars, so I decided we needed a second batch, which yielded another 5 500-ml jars, nine in total. I only had one apple left, so I increased the quantity of strawberries to compensate for that. That should work out fine, as strawberries are much more acidic than apples. All the jars sealed.
There was even a half cup of the pie filling left over, which Attila enjoyed for his afternoon snack.
For tonight’s meal we enjoyed a green salad using two kinds of lettuce from the garden, edible pod peas from the garden, and herbs from the garden, served with homemade salad dressing made with the leftover brine from last year’s canned Cowboy Candy (sweet pickled Jalapeno Peppers). Next we enjoyed our homemade sausage patties on homemade whole-wheat burger buns, topped with home canned dill pickles. And finally we enjoyed tender cooked baby beats and greens from the garden. I drizzled a bit of homemade Thai Sweet Chilli Sauce over mine, and it was oh so good.
The baby beets we had for dinner were the plants Attila thinned from the garden today, which we cooked and enjoyed rather than putting them into the compost bin.
So there we are, off to a good start for canning season, and making a good start on eating fresh vegetables from the garden. Preserving will be sporadic until the middle of July, when it becomes intense until the middle of October, before winding down into November.
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Updated on Sun, Jun 25 at 7:15 PM
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Quote
“Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.”
Rita Mae Brown
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I think this is why I write… and why I read.
You folks are amazing with your gardening! I thought with the new house DH might want to do some cherry or grape tomatoes but he’s not interested. But the other day I put together a couple of rail boxes with various flowers and some coleus and potato vine.
They’re still alive, so far. Lol!
That’s me, Teri, posting from a new tablet.
Thanks Teri, approved it so it should automatically publish now.
The garden is Attila’s baby. He gets a lot of input from me, but the work is all done by him. I do the research, make suggestions on what to grow, he takes the ideas and requests and turns them into reality. He did landscaping for a living at one point in the past, he loves it. I grew up on a farm and I don’t love it, I know it, understand it, but I don’t love doing it. I spent my summers working on the farm, which is very different than gardening because the crops are large, and labour intensive, and monotonous is truth be told. So we have a happy mixture of my our experiences, and Attila’s passion.
My Mom and sister put in a planter with a tomato in it, and it is doing really well on their deck. For Mother’s Day I gave both my sisters a strawberry plant to put in planters on their patios, they say they are doing very well too. I think if I were to do the garden thing myself, it would be planters on the deck!!