Our 2013 Garden

We were blessed with a very productive garden this year!

Peppers.

We got over 50 large winter squash from two plants!

Tomatoes.

Some of the first squash of the year.

Hunter helped me plant the hydrangea John gave me this summer and much to our surprise it bloomed right away! Looking at it made me happy and I look forward to watching it continue to grow :-)

Thinning and freezing the first batch of carrots. We pulled up the other half of them later in the year.

Ready to blanch.

I think I ended up freezing 12 bags of carrots and 17 of squash (not counting all the grated squash I froze).

Part of what we picked after we came home from vacation this summer.

Sometimes the squash was a little overwhelming. We probably ate it for dinner at least 4 times a week, but I did find different ways to cook it :-). John's fav was to saute it with onions in olive oil, then add Italian seasoning and Parmesan cheese. We ate a LOT of that :-)

On labor day John and I made salsa.

These were to be turned into spaghetti sauce.

I ended up with enough for four dinners!

I couldn't tell you how many buckets of raspberries I picked (or how many handfuls I ate :-) But we do have about 10 quarts in the freezer.

And two batches of jam.

Shortly before it frosted we spent a Saturday afternoon working in the garden. Among other things we harvested this.

And last of all a picture of all of our canning. Some of this dates back to what John did before we were married, and the boxes on the floor hold homemade wine. Not pictured in this post are the strawberries, peas, green beans, cucumbers, spinach and lettuce we picked, or the 5 gallonns of grapes we were given, or the 36 pound of apples we were given that I turned into apple butter, apple sauce, and apple pie filling. I'm so thankful for all the food we were blessed with to put up!