Starting to Put up the Harvest

A typical day's harvest at the moment.

Our refrigerator has finally filled up enough with fresh veg that it was time to start putting some away for the future. I started with the beans because they are by far the easiest. We are growing two plants each of yellow, green, and purple garden beans. That makes for a fist-full or so picked every day. I added about that much to my ramen at lunchtime today but there was still a lot leftover. So into the freezer the rest of them go! Each bean got lovingly rinsed, trimmed, dried, and gently shoved into a quart size freezer bag. No blanching, no muss, no fuss.

Yellow bean on the vine.

All clean!

Bagged up, labeled, and ready for the freezer.

Before I got too busy cleaning beans, I put a pot of water onto the stove to boil. Once I had the beans all bagged up, it was ready for blanching squash. Summer squash takes a little more prep before freezing. I had two types of squash to put up - the patisson strie melange and the yellow zucchini. I cut the patisson into chunks and blanched them for five minutes. I cut the zucchini into thin wedges so they only got three minutes. After their hot baths, they all dried a little on kitchen towels. Then I spread them all out on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and put them into the freezer. Freezing them this way makes it so they stay loose pieces once frozen. I can take out just the amount I want for a meal and leave the rest frozen if I want. I can also add more to the bags later down the line if/when we get overwhelmed with fresh squash again. After a couple hours, I was able to break them up into individual frozen chunks, put them into freezer bags, and returned them to cold storage.

Two varieties of blanched summer squash ready to freeze.

Bagged, labeled, and back into the freezer.

I'm still happily enjoying my cucumber-a-day habit, but that's not enough to go through them all before they start to turn on us. So, I did a couple of things with our abundance of cukes - I made a creamy cucumber soup for dinner this evening and I made some freezer pickles.

This is starting to get out of hand!

Many of our cucumbers have grown into Mobies (what we call the cucumbers that have managed to grow whale sized - Moby Dills!). Fortunately, we've had nice consistent rain this season, so none have turned bitter even as they grew humongous. They are all actually still quite sweet and tasty and made a wonderful soup. I took the four largest, peeled them (which I normally don't do but I'm following a recipe here), scooped out the seeds, diced them up, and put them in a pot with onions, garlic, a little lemon juice, vegetable broth, salt, pepper, and a dash of cayenne. Ten minutes of simmering later, I added some fresh parsley and whirled it all together in the blender. Into the fridge it went to cool. Just before serving, I whisked in some Greek yogurt to make a creamy, slightly spicy, cucumber soup. So good!

It might look like apples, but those are cucumbers!

This is such a delightful, flavorful, cool soup!

And finally, I used six more cucumbers to make quick freezer pickles. I sliced them up, added garlic and dill from our garden and a few red pepper flakes, and poured on a brine. They'll sit for about a week in the freezer before we can try them, but I've made this recipe before and they turned out well. That leaves seven cucumbers untouched, but that seems more manageable.

I love a simple freezer pickle!

Sleep tight proto-pickles. I'll see you in a week!

All of that took a couple of hours and now we have plenty of space in the refrigerator for more fresh produce. I expect it will start to fill up again very soon!

Garden 2026 is Upon Us!

Our Garden - July 25, 2026

We're back at it for another season! This is our 13th year gardening in this particular spot. (12th if you don't count the year I seeded all the beds in flowers and just let it go.) Over those years, I have realized one important thing: I'm a lazy gardener. I really enjoy gardening...every now and then when the mood strikes me. I wish I was a spend-time-in-the-garden-everyday type of gal, but I'm not. This revelation is a good thing! It has led me to plan this year's garden with my laziness in mind. 

Nearly everything in this year's garden is as close to "set it and forget it" as I could get. I planted summer and winter squash, pumpkins, beans (three kinds), corn, melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, and garlic. I've weeded a couple of times, watered and fertilized, but overall I've only gone into the garden a couple times a week to look over its progress. 

Oh! I did plant radishes too and they turned out beautifully.

Most of the work on the garden was at the beginning of the season. Let's go back in time to the middle of May. Since I had no plans to plant hardy crops like chard, beets, or peas, there was no need to get out and clean up the garden any earlier. My general rule of thumb is to plant the garden on Memorial Day weekend. This year, since that fell on the earliest date possible, I actually waited until the next weekend. Back on May 10, however, I did go through and clear the garden beds of weeds and last year's detritus. I also repaired the upper extension of the garden fence. We added an extra four feet to the top of the fence last year in an effort to keep the deer out (click here to read about that). Over the winter, the wind and the weight of the snow broke many of the bamboo uprights, so I had to repair them in anticipation of this year's onslaught of deer.

The garden on May 10, ready for clearing and repairs.

Nearly three weeks later, I did the actual planting. Everything was from seed in the main garden. I did try to start some seeds indoors, but that was not as successful as in years past. That failure didn't effect me much, though, as I had not planned on transplanting anything into the garden beds in the first place. The first thing I did was dig into the compost bin. 

Mmmm compost!

Rather than add the compost broadly to all the beds, I targeted application to just where the seeds would be planted. I did a lot of digging, but it seemed like the most efficient thing to do.

Targeted composting.

Once that was all set, I put the seeds into the ground, watered them in, wished them luck ("Do your duty!"), took a picture, and walked away.

Not quite like walking away from an explosion. 

Over the next two weeks, all my little seeds started growing (except for one zucchini) and I occasionally pulled weeds to give them the best shot.

June 14

And two weeks after that, the little seedlings were bigger plants and I was weeding less.

June 29

A month after that, the garden is beautifully lush. The vegetable plants are easily out competing the weeds and we've started to harvest. After the radishes, our first fruits of the garden were patisson strie melange squash. The heirloom pattypan squash are fun and funky. They taste pretty good too.

They can be eaten as summer squash or left to become decorative gourds.

The tri-color garden beans have started to come in and we're on the verge of being overwhelmed by cucumbers (my favorite time of the year!).

Yesterday's haul.

My new favorite thing to grow is garlic. I had never considered planting it in the past. For some reason, I thought it was too complicated or too much work. But, in the fall of 2024, we planted garlic just to have scapes the next spring. We ended up actually getting a few bulbs of garlic. I replanted eight of the cloves last fall and all of them grew! We had a lovely, tiny side dish of scapes one night for dinner and, just this morning, I harvested eight beautiful bulbs. I only have a 50/50 idea of what variety of garlic it is. I originally planted two types. Only one grew and I don't know which one. But that's okay. I like the taste of it and really love how easy and effortless it is to grow.

The garlic bed at the end of May.

Yummy garlic scapes!

Garlic sharing its bed with the morning glories.

Look at those beautiful bulbs!

I think that's enough of a report for today. As always, I hope to actually write here more often. Perhaps I actually will this year since the garden itself is so little work! 

Golden zucchini

Honeynut squash

Picklebush cucumbers

Honeybees busy at work!

A couple of our resident lurkers.