This year has been a pretty productive one for our freezer! Between the gardens, my summer counseling job, and picking, our freezer is stocked! From the garden alone we’ve already either eaten or put up (or both)…
- 11 cups of snow peas (6 frozen, 3 eaten, and 2 remaining in the fridge)
- 5 cups of string beans (all eaten)
This is only the start! Yesterday we pulled the potato plants due to some illness killing the tops off, only to end up with an 8:1 ratio of picked to planted. I now have roughly 40 pounds of ‘taters to clean, blanch, and freeze.
At work the program provided kids with bagged lunches from one of the local school systems. Apparently kids these days do not like veggies. I couldn’t see throwing away carrots and apples as they were perfectly good and, had they gone bad waiting to be processed, could be placed into the compost bin. This scrounging gave us…
- 26 cups of baby carrots (22 frozen, 4 eaten)
- 10 pounds of apples in the fridge
Between rhubarb from the Raymond property in New Sharon, fiddleheads from the neighbor’s property near them, and pick-your-owns, our freezer is well stocked.This doesn’t even include what we’ve eaten from this list or what I’ve already made quick-jams out of!
- 8 cups of fiddleheads
- 16 cups of rhubarb
- 36 cups of strawberries
- 28 cups of blueberries
I’m hoping that next week we can scrape up the money for me to either get a large canning pot or that I can figure out a way to do it without. I know I definitely don’t want to play in that hot water without the canning tongs! Regardless of how I do it, we definitely have more than enough to do some canning with.
Aside from all of this, we had an insect start eating away at our potato plants. They were pulled out of the ground about three weeks ago. From planting five pounds, we now have 40 lbs of potatoes! We couldn’t have asked for a better ratio. As far as grubs went, only one or two potatoes had been touched.
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