A good year for gardening

This has been a remarkable year in the garden.  I believe that the draught and warm weather has actually helped us out.  Typically, at this point in time, I am throwing away tomatoes that have developed black spots and mold and others would be sitting green on the vine.  This year, we've been harvesting ripe tomatoes for weeks.  I also already have winter carrots and lettuce in the ground and they seem to be doing well too. 

The showiest tomatoes we have are these violet ones.  They are the deep color of eggplant and have an interesting sweet/tart flavor.  The other two varieties are a pink variegated variety of cherry tomato and another called "black truffle".  The latter, pictured below, are the tastiest.  They are also the ones that are taking the longest to ripen and they are also the ones that the squirrels seem to like the most.  

The true star of this year's garden are the cucumbers.  We over planted with eight plants but the towers have worked out nicely.  Where the towers left off, my daughter's fourteen foot tall sunflower took over.  Some of the cucumbers are so high, we will probably need a ladder to get at them.  We are harvesting about ten a week and giving away many of them.

This past weekend, we pickled several jars of cucumbers and beans.   They should be ready in a few weeks and I am anxious to see how they came out. 

The whole family got in on the "pickle assembly line" this year, which made things run more smoothly than usual.

Until the pickles are ready, we can still enjoy a mix of our cherry tomatoes.  This year has been a real treat.

Pickling 2009

It seemed a little stunted early on but the garden is finally doing well. Though the pumpkins are getting huge and taking over, we had enough beans and cucumbers today do a pickling session this afternoon.

I got mixed reviews from the sweet pickles from last year so I thought I'd change it up a little this year. I think they came out just fine but it just seems that most the folks I know just prefer dill. This year, I decided to go the dill route. We purchased, from the OP Farmer's Market, fresh red garlic, dill, and hot peppers to complete the recipe. For the recipes, I found a couple online that looked good. The beans are brined with 2c each of water and white wine vinegar with 1/4c of salt, boiled. This is then poured over the beans, garlic, hot pepper, dill, and peppercorns that I jammed into a jar. The dill pickles were similar except I didn't use any pepper, used regular distilled vinegar, and put much more garlic and dill in the jars. All of the jars were processed for 12 minutes in boiling water. The afternoon's efforts yielded 8 jars of pickles and 4 jars of beans. Supposedly they will be ready in 6 weeks. I'll update you when the tasting begins.
A side note: I will be planting more beans and will also try peas next year. They have been the easiest crop and they taste great.

If life gives you cucumbers...

...make pickles.

Since my escapades of working on the garage are not worth writing about (and still have me steamed), I figure I'd post about a new endeavor at the Tiny Bungalow that is a bit more positive: canning. I've never done this before but I did watch my mom do it when I was young.

I used about half of our cucumbers and made 8 pints of bread & butter pickles. My family is not a big sweet pickle eater so unless I could find a contractor that would work for pickles, I figured it wasn't worth making any more.
Overall, the canning experience went well, which is a good thing since I have ingredients to make a few pints of salsa for canning tomorrow night. Hopefully that will go just as well. I also hope make some headway with the garage tomorrow and post the long sad story.