Mmmm, dilly beans!
What Are You Harvesting?
I love having an abundance of fresh veggies in the summer. There is such a sense of satisfaction when your entire meal is home raised! I hope you are harvesting lots of fresh food from your homestead too!
My beans have mostly been munched to the ground by rabbits (we’re attempting to ‘harvest’ the rabbits, no luck yet), and my zucchini didn’t germinate very well…go figure. However, we have lots of yellow crookneck squash, beets, onions, potatoes, kale, rutabaga, and herbs coming from the garden. The lettuce, spinach and peas are all done, but I’m planting more for the fall. The tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and eggplants have lots of flowers, so hopefully we’ll have a nice harvest from them soon.
Fresh beets from the garden.
So What Do You Do With All Those Veggies?
Here are a fewideas for using your fresh veggies this summer! You can:
- Make Brine Cured Dilly Beans
- Ferment Small Batches of Veggies
- Make Brine Cured Pickles
- Bake Zucchini Pineapple Bread
- Freeze Mixed Vegetables
You may also preserve fresh fruits by canning them for winter. I like to can peaches and grape juice and jelly.
Of course, nothing beats freshly picked fruits and veggies straight from the garden. Steam, microwave, or saute your veggies until just tender and eat them the same day for the most nutritional value.
Hi Lisa:
Wanted to let you know a sure fire way to keep out the rabbits. It’s so simple, it sounds like just an old wives tale. At least I thought of it that way when the lady across the road told me this. She said it worked for them, so I thought I would try it. After all, it couldn’t hurt anything. The cost to do this was less than $5! Which was a lot less than loosing my harvest! Where we lived, there were so many rabbits, just 10 or more whenever you’d look out onto the garden just outside the kitchen window.
So I went to the store and bought 2 small boxes of “Moth Balls”. She said to put them out, all around the outside perimeter of our garden, about 1 foot, out in the grass, all around it’s perimeter. I did this, just as she said. When I finished, I took a look and thought….”how in the world is that going to keep the rabbits and the deer from eating our plants”? Sure they don’t smell good. However, when I was inside the garden, between the rows, I couldn’t smell anything from the moth balls. Not even when I was standing right there, standing right over one of the moth balls!
However, sure enough, we would see rabbits across the street, but never did they go close to their garden! Then, we would see the rabbits around the other side of our house still, but never did they go close to our garden! We only had one sweet potato plant that was bothered by anything and that was black biting ants! We kept that potato in the garden, because all of the ants were attacking just that one. We felt if we dug it up and got rid of it, that the ants would just move over and discover that we had more sweet potatoes growing in that row. Sure enough, they kept eating on just that one plant and never moved to any of the rest of them in that row!
Hope you try this!
Tirtzah
Hi Tirtzah,
I’ve read other peoples suggestion to use moth balls in the garden, however, I am an organic gardener and moth balls contain poisons that are not good for us. So I haven’t tried it. Sorry!