Tomatoes . . . . and our other garden treats

One more bag was filled after these went into the freezer.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I went a little crazy on tomatoes this garden season.  Eighteen plants crazy.  They all took and produced a plethora of tomatoes.  We even had one scraggly additional tomato plant, a little cherry tomato plant from last year.  Of course, tomatoes up here in the Northland are ready right when the school year gets crazy.  Not having much time to deal with them, with it being the school year and having a baby at home, we just washed them, cut the tops off, and threw them into freezer bags.  Six gallon freezer bags.  Once things calm down (ha!) we will turn those into spaghetti sauce.  We also made salsa.  LOTS of salsa.  Finally, we diced up about 10 cups worth of tomatoes and froze those as well.  This of course does not include the tomatoes that we sliced up for tacos, fresh salsas, salads, and my favorite thing about summer, just slicing, sprinkling with salt and enjoying.

Salsa, two containers have already been enjoyed.

We also had a very successful delicata squash plant, which is perfect because Lilly LOVES squash.  We cooked most of it up, pureed it and froze it for Lilly.  We did manage to save two squash for us to enjoy.

I also made about seven additional jars of fridge pickles with our cucumbers, which so far, have all been delicious.

Peppers have never grown for us, despite our efforts every summer.  This summer it was finally hot enough to get peppers, both hot peppers and bell peppers.  Unfortunately, the growing season was so short for the bell peppers that all we got were these tiny little peppers, about the size of a golf ball.  We did get quite a few hot peppers that went into the salsa.  At some point soon I hope to use the food processor to chop up the rest, stick them in a bag and use those when we make chili and such this winter.

 The biggest disappointment was our carrots.  Early in the summer we had a downpour, about 7 inches in a few hours, that we're pretty sure washed away or drowned our carrot seeds.  I tried replanting new seeds.  Then we had weeks of super hot weather which may have baked those seeds.  At the end of September we picked the 7 carrots from our garden.  While not the haul we were hoping for, they were absolutely delicious.

All in all, not a bad selection of produce considering we planted in May with a three-month old, had two surgeries (thank you to my dad for coming up shortly after Nick's surgery to weed our garden for us - a two+ hour adventure), and both working full-time come harvest season.