It’s been awhile since I’ve done a Saturday on the Farm update.  Here are a few pictures of the end of the harvest.

I froze lots of green bell peppers. Some diced, strips, and halves for stuffed peppers. It is so convenient to pull these out of the freezer. I plan on growing and freezing even more next year.

I still didn’t get to can tomatoes yet. I froze them until I get the chance, and feel up to it. We washed, cored, and bagged. So when I’m ready, I can just pull them out and dump them into the pan.

 

This is my delightful Burning Bush in my Bible Garden. This picture does not do it justice. I couldn’t get a picture that showed the fabulous red leaves at their best.

The leaves are all gone now, and the bush is still striking with the brown branches and all the red berries.

 

Now it’s time to plan next years garden! Have you started planning yours yet?

 

Here are a few links I found interesting and helpful:

Grow Your Own Tea
Root Cellars 101
Chicken Treats
Printable Elderberry PDF’s – Lots of great information about elderberries
Growing Ginger

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I’ve been busy this week trying to stay caught up with preserving out harvest. The zucchini is staying ahead of me, though. lol I shredded 5 two cup bags worth of zucchini this week and put them in the freezer. In the big bag in the back, you can see two other small bags I already froze. I put the small bags inside a big bag to keep them from falling all over the freezer. And my toes. lol I have about  6 or 7 zucchinis waiting to do something with. As soon as I get the energy, I want to can pineapple zucchini.

Here’s some of what we harvested this week. Zucchini, raspberries and what we think might be the last picking of the green beans. There’s still some out there, but we have to make sure we save enough for next years seeds.

And more red raspberries another day.

Here’s my helper Hannah picking an Armenian Cucumber.

Here’s my  youngest, Zach with our harvest that morning. Two Armenian Cucumbers, yellow squash, a tomato and a green pepper. yum!

I was surprised this week with two more Hibiscus flowers. Beautiful.

Have you harvested any interesting vegetables lately, or had any surprise flowers?

 

Here are a few links I found interesting and helpful:

Propagating Elderberry Bushes
Maple Sugar – how to videos
Homemade Fertilizer

Use Lime to Kill Ticks
Greenhouses Made From Old Windows and Doors
DIY PVC Tomato Cage

 

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I have a lot of pictures to share this week. I’ll start with what we harvested this week. I’m sure we harvested more yellow squash, as we’ve been eating it, and I put a couple of bags in the freezer this week. I guess I missed taking pictures of those.

More zucchini, and a few little raspberries. The ones that made it into the house lol

A yellow squash and green beans.

More green beans! The family prepped all the beans in both pictures tonight, so I’ll be canning them tomorrow.

I never tire of watching the butterflies on the butterfly bush.

I also never tire of taking pictures of butterflies on the butterfly bush.  🙂

Ok, now for the gardens. This is one end of our main vegetable garden. Two rows of green beans on the right. To the left of those, are the yellow squash plants in the front and the zucchini plants in the back. Where the cardboard is pulled back and you see soil is where we planted carrots and beets earlier this week. One row of each. Nothing was up today when I took this picture. In the very back left, you can see the cucumbers growing on the fence, and on the ground.

Those are Armenian Cucumbers. This the first year I’ve grown them. They came highly recommended. I found two large ones today.

 

And several small ones. Now I have to look up when they are ready to pick. I can’t wait to try them! I’ll also be using them to can relish and pickles.

We haven’t had any peppers so far this year. Now that the extreme heat we had this summer is over, the garden is really growing Here are a few green bell peppers. Maybe we’ll get to eat some later this week!

This is a Roma Tomato plant. Or maybe two. I’m not sure. Look at all the flowers! There are also several tomatoes growing on it, too. We also have slicer tomatoes growing and should have some ready later this week.

We also planted radish this week. Here are a few. Cute little things.  🙂  We also planted lettuce and spinach in the raised bed behind the house. There are a lot up, and I’ll share a pic of them next week.

The yellow squash is really growing. Here’s one plant. See all the little squash?

The red raspberries are flourishing. These are so good!

I hope you enjoyed my little garden tour.  See you next week!

 

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I only have one picture to share this week. There isn’t anything terribly exciting going on outside right now. No awesome flowers blooming. Well, the two Butterfly Bush’s are blooming, but I can only share so many of those pictures.

So I have a harvest picture for you this week. Here’s some of what we harvested this week. There was more yellow squash and zucchini that isn’t in this picture. Those were eaten or frozen. Also not shown are the red raspberries that I ate. While standing at the vine. lol We have a lot more that will be ready soon. Combined with what I have in the freezer from this spring, I hope to have enough to make a few jars of raspberry jam and chocolate raspberry syrup. I really want to make the syrup! I will probably make that before the jam. 🙂

 

Oh yeah, lol, here’s the picture.

That’s 7 quarts of green beans ready for the pressure canner. And two bowls of green beans ready to be canned. I process the 7 quarts already. They all sealed! So the rest will be canned tomorrow. We have lots more green beans in the garden still to come. We love home canned green beans!

Have you done any preserving of your garden harvest?

 

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I have more pictures to share with you this week for my Saturday on the Farm tour. That makes me happy.   🙂

As does this Rose I found in the Bible Garden.

 

How about a fun celery plant grown from the bottom of a store bought celery bunch?

It’s been fun watching it grow. I cleared out the rest of this raised bed to plant another crop of lettuce and spinach. i have netting on top of it now, so hopefully the kittens won’t destroy most of this crop.

Marigolds, amoungst other things, growing in the containers my daughter planted.

A fun little flower. And all the marigolds will be saved to use as herbs. That makes me happy.

Here’s a basket of veggies we picked earlier in the week. The green beans were just barely enough for one meal. We would have eaten more if we’d had them.

And  here’s the basket my husband picked last night.

A lot more green beans! Yeah! Very soon, we’ll be getting this basket full every day or two. Then I’ll be pulling out the pressure canner. Having lots of home grown, home canned green beans for the winter makes me very happy!

 

Hope you enjoyed this tour of my gardens!

 

Here are a few links that I found interesting and helpful:

Flowers You Can Eat
The Five Healthiest Backyard Weeds
Vegetables and Herbs to Plant in July – Well, maybe you can still plant them in August!

Tin Can Garden
Funnel Planter
How to Create a Planting Calendar Allsun Style

Homemade and Natural Remedies for Poison Ivy
Jewel Weed Natural Poison Ivy Treatment
The Easiest Way to Preserve Herbs
Make a wood and wire basket to carry your fresh veggies in – love it!

 

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Nothing very exciting going on here this week. I picked our first zucchini. I guess that is exciting.

 

I’ve either been sick or too busy to take pictures. So for now, the zucchini will have to do.

I’m planning on getting quite a few things planted this week in the garden. Lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, onions, turnips, peas Our first frost date here in southern Kentucky is in October, so we still have plenty of growing time.

I’m also going to plant some herbs. Again. I had big plans for growing a lot of herbs so I would have plenty of my own for cooking. Everything I have planted so far has died. Died. sigh. I usually have no trouble growing herbs, so I don’t know whats wrong. I thought maybe it might be the starting mix I planted in, but the vegetables planted in it grew just fine.  So…. I’m going to plant some more and hope for the best.

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I’m back again to share my garden tour. I’m starting with a favorite of mine. The Mimosa blossom. So pretty and delicate, and fragrant. We can walk outside the door and smell them. The hummingbirds love them, also.

Here’s the Mimosa tree view from the back yard. See all the blossoms? It’s a gorgeous tree. We lost a large branch off it during storms recently, but thankfully the rest of the tree didn’t go down.

This is part of our vegetable garden. At the bottom of the picture, you can see the leaves of our one and only surviving broccoli plant. Front to back, the rest of the plants are cabbage, zucchini and yellow squash and green beans. There is another row of green beans behind the one you can see. Actually, there are 4 rows. We have two fence lines and plant on both sides of the fences. We have lots of green bean blossoms now, so we’re looking forward to a lot of green beans. I’ll be canning them. 🙂

The squash and zucchini plants all have a lot of blossoms. We did find one zucchini when I was taking pictures that will be ready soon.

The cabbage hasn’t come to a head yet, hopefully the heat hasn’t got to it and it still will. I can’t explain why next to this perfect one is one riddle with bug holes. I’ll just take it. lol

These are some of my Armenian Cucumber plants. This is the first year I’ve grown them and they came highly recommended. I’m looking forward to trying them.

These tomato plants are on the outside of the compost bin. On the side, and more going behind it. There are a lot of blossoms and we even found a small green tomato.

This is on the inside of the bin pictured above. More volunteer tomato plants! These All these plants are doing so good! This is the side of the compost bins that is ready. I pulled out as much as I could without hurting the tomatoes.  The other side of the bins is the current one we’re adding to, and it now has a couple of tomato plants growing in it.  I think we’ll have a bumper crop of tomatoes this year!

I’ll take pictures of the tomatoes in the actual vegetable garden after we get them weeded. lol

The raspberries are blooming again and we have a few berries that will be ready in the next couple of days. We always get more berries in the fall than we do in the spring. I’m looking forward to canning some and freezing some.

My husband found this mystery plant in the backyard in front of the rabbit hutch. No rabbits currently live there, but I guess the plant likes the fertile soil left behind by the previous tenants. lol

I had a few sweet potatoes start growing in the kitchen so I planted them in this planter in the front yard. The vines are growing everywhere. It looks a mess because I put all the vines back in the planter instead of all over the flower garden. I hope we get some sweet potatoes from them.

The butterfly bushes are still blooming. New growth is coming, too, so we’ll have flowers for a while. The butterflies (of course, lol), bees and lots of other insects love these flowers.

I love the little Feverfew flowers, too.

 

Hope you enjoyed touring my gardens!

 

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