Napoleon54

I remember several Apexers talking about gardens a few months ago and am curious how everything's going.

I've been helping the 'rents a lot with thiers lately. Peas, beets, broccoli, cauliflower are done with for the season. Zucchini are still chugging along and we're getting a few acorn squash that're big enough to pick. Butternut squash are on thier way too, but not big enough yet. We've been getting a steady stream of tomatoes for about a week now and it looks like they'll keep coming for another 2 or 3 weeks. I've made a few small batches of sauce (~2 quarts each) for current use and dad's been canning the rest unsauced for future use (prolly 12-14qts of that so far). Peppers (green bell, red bell, and banana) are still chugging along too but probably not for too much longer.

Apparently some of the seedlings dad got this spring when he planted the garden were mislabeled by the nursery 'cause 12 plants that were supposed to be beefsteaks turned out to be cherry tomatoes. Thus we ended up with 16 cherry tomato plants instead of the 4 he wanted. This mixup has allowed us to make the following conclusion: nobody (lemme repeat that: NOBODY!) needs sixteen cherry tomato plants. Ugh! Yesterday I picked the plants clean of everything ripe and ended up with ~16lbs of cherry tomatoes. And what can you do with them? Not much, so after about 3 hours of cleaning, blending, cooking, filtering, reheating, and bottling, I had 1 gallon of tomato juice. Blargh, what a pain, not worth the effort, even if it did make a nice bloody mary.

Apples are just starting to come into season and I'm wicked excited about that. 'Rents have 10 really old and large apple trees on their property that were largely neglected before they moved here a couple years ago. Dad sprays them for bugs a few times over the summer but that's about it aside from picking apples from them. This past week my youngest brother and I cleared out all the brush and weeds that had piled up underneath them and trimmed the lower branches. What a difference that made! We've also been picking up all the drop apples and have pressed maybe 7 gallons of cider thus far. Mmmmmm!!!! It'll be another month or so until most of the apples are ready and when that happens I'll probably be doing a batch of cider every day (2-3 gallons with the current setup), in addition to apple sauce, pies, etc. I'm most excited about the cider 'cause I want to ferment a bunch of it.

Lots of yummy stuff here! How about you?

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The unsustainable cannot be sustained.