The summer garden is winding itself down here at the Blind Pig house. We’re still getting plenty of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, peppers, and beans. We’re still waiting on the corn, pumpkins, winter squash, and watermelons.
I’ve started thinking about our fall garden. I cleaned off one of the tomato beds in preparation for planting several varieties of Sow True Seed Kale sometime this month. I usually plant turnips and greens in the fall garden as well.
While my mind’s been thinking about fall, my hands have been busy putting up the bounty of summer. Things I’ve put up this summer:
You can click on the links to learn more about each item.
- Dilled Beans
- Canned Greenbeans
- Frankie Chastain’s Green Tomato Pickles
- Aunt Lee’s Bread and Butter Pickles
- Pickled Beets
Tipper
All the “putting-up” puts me in mind of all my years of making a garden and working patches on the farm–and yes preserving, pickling and canning (and later freezing) for winter use. You industrious people are surely in for some “good eats” later. The already-processed, as we say in Appalachia, “don’t hold a candle to” the homemade varieties. I would still “put up” if I had a garden to gather from! Hard work, but enjoyable: and the future good, healthful meals are rewards for all the hard labor and bounty of harvest!
David-thank you for the comment! Yep Nanette told me the recipe came from Martha’s Aunt Lee. I’m so glad she shared the recipe with me. Granny and I both say it makes hands down the best bread and butter pickles we’ve ever tasted. Granny even threw the recipe shed been using for years away : ) Sounds like Aunt Lee was an amazing person too.
Tipper,
The summer here has been so hot and muggy, passing so slow, like a slug without his slime! ewww
Bet that would hurt the old slug! ha
No way we will plant greens until this weather breaks maybe even waiting until early September!
The Farmers Almanac comment today said that the very hot days of August mean a long, snowy and cold winter. Ooooshie!
Thanks Tipper
It’s a busy time for sure. We put up corn, kraut, vegetable soup, and pasta sauce this past week. Now I’m waiting on my pickling cucumbers, and apples will be coming in soon. Our mid-garden, as I call it, is coming on–second planting beans, corn, carrots, and squash. We will be planting fall garden as soon as a few other things finish up. This year we dehydrated the onions because we seem to lose so many to rot if we store them in the cellar.
Hello Tipper. I believe Nanette got that recipe from Martha. Aunt Lee (Kelley) was a very special member of the Owen family and especially close to Mary Porter, Martha’s mom. Everyone in the family loved those pickles and for years Martha would give her Dad a jar for Christmas….that was all he wanted. He might have been Lee’s biggest pickle fan. Lee was a fantastic country cook and always had a garden. She was born in the Snowbird area and moved to Murphy in her teens. She joined the military during the war, married “Kelley”, who always bragged about her cooking, raised a family in Texas, had her own little truck stop restaurant for years, and then moved back to Murphy when Kelley retired from the oil fields. I am so grateful that she came back so that the kids and I could know and love Aunt Lee. David Liden
I’m thinking fall garden also. But it is still too early to get bedding plants and we are still in severe drought. So I’m fence straddling a bit. Our corn has come and gone and some of the beans have done their do and could be pulled up.
The summer garden hardly got here, and it’s running out of juice ( thanks to only one light rain in the last few weeks). Our garden has really done well, this year, but how fast the time passes from days of plenty until days of lean.
Words from a very wise man from Wilson Hollow:
The days pass so swiftly, and the years have come and gone
From since I first remember ’til now don’t seem that long……