Tag Archives: gardening

Apple Harvest 2025

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In non fibery news, my summer apple tree did very well this year. I harvested close to four plastic grocery bags of decent apples. I probably composted 50 times as much due to bird and animal loss. Or just failing to pick and they got rotten. And that is okay, I am not a commercial apple producer.

I cleaned up the apples and cut out all the bad or buggy bits and dropped into a pressure cooker. My preferred method is jelly from juice so I like to harvest that from the fruit. I cook as much of the apple including core an seed to develop as much natural pectin as possible

The juice is coming out very deep rose colored this year with the peel influencing the color. I use cheese close to harvest the juice. The kids didn’t really appreciate the apple sauce pulp flavor so I chose not to try to salvage any of that. I gave some to my friends with chickens and composted the rest.

It is crazy back to school time again so I don’t have capacity to make jelly right now so I sterilized several jars and I’m freezing the juice until I have time to work it. I am hoping that I can also get my hands on more wine grapes to re-stash my grape jelly stash as well this year.

And then I would just do a large cook day for jelly processing. Hopefully with extra hands to help!

Happy Canning!!

Last Throws Of Gardening

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My garden is on its last legs but we are still getting some decent veggies. Last night’s picking included some tomatoes, poblanos and jalapenos.

My tomatoes are HUGE and none are smaller than my fist, lol.

Right now we are just cooking what we need for recipes and freezing the rest. I think Jellybean wants to try to make ketchup at some point. But that can be a good mid-winter boredom project.

Happy Gardening!!

Garden Start

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Well, its after Mother’s day now so it’s safe to start our garden in earnest here in Kansas. But first I thought I’d share what we put in April for cold heardy plants.

First up, we have a whole bed of onions (left) we chose a mix of white, yellow and red this year to mix things up. The only other thing I would have liked would have been some shallots. And on the other planter is overflow onions and some cauliflower.

In our main bed we put two more cauliflower (they might get ripped out and transplanted later in favor of some broccoli. And then we also put in three different kinds of romaine. The hubby and I really enjoy fresh salads and fresh greens on our burgers and sandwiches.

The next plan is to add tomatoes, peppers, broccoli and possibly some zucchini. I think we need a separate planter for the zucchini as the last time we planted it TOOK OVER.

Anyone else feeling the garden itch this year?

Inattentive Gardening

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Between keeping up with a two month old and doing some late summer traveling….we sorta lost track of some of our garden. Our tomatoes and bell peppers aren’t doing diddly squat and worms ate our jalapenos. But wowza our zucchini went nuts and we didn’t notice…..

Here’s my hand for scale….

These were too woody and tough to eat but we made a nice vegetable dice for the deer in the nearby woods, lol. And fingers crossed we can salvage some more produce yet this summer that isn’t ginormous.