Saturday, July 3, 2010

The Garden is in Full Production Now!

We are now spending a great deal of time harvesting and processing vegetables from the garden. Right now the beans are going gang busters!  We have yellow and green snap beans and we couldn't ask for better looking crops.  So that is how we are spending our late Saturday afternoon; washing, tipping, blanching, and freezing beans.  We both get a great deal of satisfaction from filling our freezer full of the produce that we've grown.

The zucchini and yellow summer squash are also producing well.  We have them in at least one meal every day.  That's another thing I love about this time of year.  I like the challenge of trying to use as much of our produce as possible in all my cooking.  Summer squash is very versatile and can be incorporated into every meal. It is wonderful in pancakes or muffins for breakfast.  For lunch today, I sauteed yellow squash, zucchini, onion, garlic, and a few chopped yellow beans in olive oil.  Then I added the leftover spaghetti sauce and six little meatballs from dinner the other night.  That, a loaf of fresh, homemade bread, a little cottage cheese, and fresh blueberries made for a wonderful lunch. Tonight I'll make a salad with long, thin strips of the squash, chopped tomatoes, and toss it with a fresh basil, pine nut, and olive oil dressing.  With bison burgers (from local bison, of course) cooked on the grill and bulgur with chevre and cilantro, it will be a perfect holiday weekend dinner.  Summer eating is so great!

2 comments:

  1. Your beans look yummy! In my garden I'm getting lots of cucumbers and summer squash, but I planted my beans using the three sisters method, a squash, a corn, and a bean seed in one hole. I was told that this is a common way to utilize space and the beans would grow on the corn stalk. The squash is in full production, but the corn and the beans seem to be slow. I'm in Fries VA and we had some late frost so I had to replant in late may. Should I just be patient or do you think the three sisters method is the problem?

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  2. Sorry for taking so long to respond, Truffler. If your weather is anything like ours this year, it got hot very quickly and the various vegetables did not respond like usual. If your corn and beans haven't started growing yet, you can replant beans in early August in Virginia. You might be able to pull off another crop of corn, too, if you plant a short season variety right away. I, too, have had mixed success with the three sisters method. But it is fun when it works!

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