Friday, July 22, 2011

We are eating Tomatoes folks!!!

We picked our first tomato on July 5th! I personally think it is a great way to celebrate our Independence! We've even had enough to can 5 quart jars and of course we've eaten lots of fresh garden salsa and have already had BLT's a couple times. 
There's been some problems with our trellis design and we've had some plants fall over, but thankfully we were able to pull them back up and create a new cage around them. A few green tomatoes did fall off in the process but I think the plants themselves are going to pull through.

 This was our first big harvest of the year.
We've been eating LOTS of cucumbers. Julie's family has a favorite recipe of cucumbers with salt and mayo, and we made up a recipe of yogurt with lemon juice, dill and salt (kind of like Greek tzatziki, but with mostly cucumbers).  We've also been putting cucumbers in berry smoothies; we were surprised at how good it is!
Strawberries we picked in Iowa. 8qts in the freezer and we canned 12 pints of jelly


 These with some vanilla ice cream is one of our favorite deserts!!

Nice sized zucchini squash

 We like to grill them... enough said!

2 comments:

Lori said...

Yum!!! I've been juicing cucumbers and eating slices with homemade hummus. Putting them in smoothies is a great idea too! Have you ever made your own pickles?

James Attaway said...

We tried making pickles (the canned type) last year... they came out tasting good, but they were very mushy. Julie's grandmother gave us a recipe for fridge pickles, and they're GOOOOD! They're crunchy, fresh tasting, and a nice refreshing snack. We've heard people have secrets for keeping pickles crunchy, but our tomatoes and tomatillo salsa have been keeping us occupied in the canning department.