Garden update

For reasons which are difficult to explain unless you've seen our garden, we don't like picking green beans. And that's putting it mildly. Let me give an example. Last week, I was on the front porch putting on my shoes to go out and work in the garden when Caleb was sent out to come help me. We talked for a few minutes, procrastinating and discussing how we would go about picking. Usually, Caleb kindly volunteers to pick all the other vegetables in the garden while the rest of us pick the beans, and on this particular day I was trying to swap with him. He didn't really want to do that, so I tried a different idea. We had had company over the night before and since we wanted to fellowship with them and when they left we wanted to go to bed, the kitchen had not been cleaned up all the way. I told Caleb that I really needed to go clean the kitchen so that when he came in with the green beans, I would be ready to can them. He turned it around and volunteered to do the kitchen himself. That's how much he dislikes picking green beans. Caleb, who never, ever, okay, hardly ever does any dishes offers to clean the entire kitchen just to get out of picking some vegetables in the garden. So I agreed and he did a pretty good job. But all this to say that I am very happy to announce that we are finished with the green beans! Yay! We canned just over one hundred quarts, which was our goal, so now we are leaving the rest for seeds that we will gather later. Now don't get me wrong; we have really enjoyed picking, snapping, canning, and eating our green beans. It's just that crawling on your hands and knees in the mud picking beans that are all around you gets a little tiring. Next year, the rows have got to be farther apart.

Our cucumbers have also begun to die off, which is another "Yay!". I think we've canned at least 25 qts of pickles, and Mom has made some pickle relish. Squash I believe is still coming in well and our peppers and tomatoes are beginning to ripen. And the okra. . . Now I'm not an okra fan. It's slimy and, to me, it's somewhat bitter and just doesn't have a very good taste. With one exception. Fried. And boy, do I love fried okra! Well, our okra is beginning to come in and the other day we picked some, but it wasn't quite enough to bother freezing. So we fried it up using BCF's recipe and oh. . .it was sooo good! It was easy to fry, too. Our okra is huge. I mean, an inch-to-an-inch-and-a-half-in-diameter huge. Great appetizers. It's so nice to be able to be eating food out of our little garden. The LORD has been very good to us!

So that's a garden update. Kinda boring, I know, but that's a lot of what we've been doing. I'll have to give some other sort of update, and maybe some pictures, later. Today is Saturday and we have company coming which means there's a lot of cooking and cleaning to do.

. . .ahhh, no more tunnels. . .