We officially cleared out our garden this weekend and over the past few weeks, we have had quite the harvest! And a pretty darn good one at that! Considering I'm a first time Gardener that didn't even know the word "till" until I started to get into this stuff, I would say I'm pretty pleased with what we have accomplished this summer/fall! It's been fun to watch the garden grow, do some weeding (or not), and see the vegetables start to grow and finally ripen so that we can pick them. We picked veggies from the garden on a daily basis over the past couple of weeks, and tried our best to not let our large harvest go bad.
First of all, as a reminder, this is where we started:
And we watched it grow...
And Grow some more...
And finally things started to ripen...
And before we knew it, we had more tomatoes, peppers, jalapeño peppers, lettuce and squash than we knew what to do with!
So...we ate lots of fresh veggies straight out of the garden, cooked and froze all the squash to have for the winter, made 3 big batches of stuffed peppers and froze them, made a huge double batch of homemade tomato soup AND homemade potato soup and froze it all in individual containers mostly to use for lunches, made a massive batch of stuffed jalapeño peppers and froze them to pull out and use whenever, and cleaned and froze over 5 gallon-size zip lock bags of tomatoes to be used in the near future to make salsa, pasta sauce, etc.
Both of our freezers are full and we have been enjoying the goods of our garden, and will continue to enjoy them for quite some time!! I would say year 1 of our gardening experience has been a success and we are looking forward to gardening again next year, with of course adapting some things that we learned along the way (aka that one tomato plant produces more than just 5 tomatoes each!!)
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