54°f/about 12°C, clear.
Yesterday we did a bit of a garden cleanout, picking most of what's left of the summer vegetables---limas, peppers, tomatillos, a few tomatoes, butternut, yellow and zucchini squashed, a bit of broccoli. I sadly pulled the cucumber vines from their arbor, but left one that had a couple hopeful blooms; the rest of the plants were dead.
These are the 5-gallon buckets we came out of the garden with. My pockets and hands were full too, with flowers, lettuce, green onions, and cherry tomatoes for a lunchtime salad.
It took a while to sort out those buckets! Then to decide what to do with it all. The butternuts went into a basket; i will wipe them down tomorrow with a weak bleach solution and store them in the back room because they require cool, dry storage. The cellar is too damp for them. The zucchinis went into the fridge, to be ground up and frozen to use as filler in soups and stews, and for zucchini bread. The overripe yellow squash and cucumbers were chopped up and given to the chickens, and the rabbits got broccoli that had bolted.
I cooked up the young yellow squash, drained it and mashed it, then seasoned with butter, salt and pepper and bagged up for the freezer. It makes a nice substitute for mashed potatoes, and so handy to have it frozen.
When that was done I sat down and shelled the dry limas, spread them on a tray and put them into the oven to finish drying over the pilot light. I will shell the green ones tomorrow and freeze them. The limas germinated very badly; only about 10 seeds came up, but boy did they produce!
Yesterday I tackled the peppers and tomatillos, making a green salsa. I've never made this before but it came out very well. It will be good mixed into soup beans and chili, or just eaten with tortilla chips. This is the first time I have grown tomatillos in probably 40 years. Such interesting fruit, the way they are covered with a husk. I used to grow ground cherries and garden huckleberries back in the 70s when I was enthusiastically growing everything I could find, from cotton to broom corn and even peanuts once. The ground cherries and huckleberries both had husks too, so I suppose must be in the same plant family---and all are related to tomatoes. If you are interested, I found the recipe here.
While working on the salsa I put together a white bean chili, using fajita chicken I had in the freezer. It was absolutely delicious! We had it for lunch, and I canned the rest, along with a couple jars of pinto beans and the chicken broth I made the other day. So both the waterbath canner and the pressure canner were on the stove. By the way, the recipe for the white bean chili is on this website. I highly recommend it! I used dry beans instead of canned, soaking and cooking them first. And I used my canned jalapeños and a bit of my hot sauce to get just the flavor I was looking for.
It was a challenge to find enough jars for all this! I cleaned a couple of odds and ends out of the fridge, then moved some dried herbs from canning jars into other jars I had kept just in case. So I finally found enough, with a few left over. This, I think, is pretty much the last of the this year's garden canning. All that's left are a few tomatoes, and the fall greens.
I will need jars in November, though, when we make apple butter, so I may have to buy those, unless my sons bring enough for us all.
Now to do the garden cleanup, not an enjoyable job but needs to be done. And then? Start planning from next year!
That sure keeps you busy. I always save the jars my brother gives me with their homemade pickles and return them for future use. You have to hunt down all of the jars you've given away! ;)
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