Adult Baby Food

When you eat pureed soup, do you ever feel like you're eating baby food?

This was some good baby food here... a sun dried tomato and butternut squash mix. Can't get that in a little jar!

Here's one satisfied customer.

p.s. the squash was from my garden last summer.

Around This Place

Some praying going on, mostly done by this fellow...

Talk about blonde highlights!

Coleus and succulents

Fresca enjoying fresh air and the flowers in the front yard.

Peek-a-boo!

St. Francis

Francis... the male version of Francesca's name... and my dad's middle name.

Buon Giorno

Francesca and I were up at the crack of dawn... here's some pics of our morning in the garden...

There's my best sunflower!

See the moon?

Thai basil

HOT Thai pepper

A ripening Connecticut pumpkin

Vincent joined us in the the pumpkin patch.

Fresca eating a fig from our funky fig tree.

Have a nice day lovelies!

Me vs. Spaghetti Sauce Canning

I won!

It all began Sunday around 3:30pm...

Actually it all began a few days ago when I received an abundance of tomatoes from our neighbor's garden.

To peel the tomatoes, dip them briefly in boiling water...

Then an icy cold bath... the peel slips right off.

Francesca enjoyed some tomato while waiting for her mommy to hold her...

Here's a portion of the 20+ pounds of peeled home grown tomato goodness...

Here's some of them seeded and squeezed of most of their juice.

I ended up with 40 oz of tomato juice.

Soon Jason will enjoy some home-made bloody mary's.

Mommy holding her precious tomato stained princess...

More ingredients to be added:

onion, basil, oregano, salt, pepper, garlic, red pepper...

More yummy natural vitamin c and lycopene...

There's my new monster of a pressure cooker! After I cooked the sauce and ladled it into the 9 jars, it was about 8:30. Once I got the pressure up to 11 pounds, they processed for 25 minutes.

All processed and ready to be put up!

Garden Update

Here's some photos from our garden this week. The vertical gardening is going pretty well. I like how the veggies are kept off the dirt so they stay clean, mostly bug free, and are easily harvested.

Here is our pumpkin patch in the "triangle" garden area. I know I planted these too close together but I do every year. One year I will learn my lesson. maybe going back and reading my blog garden posts will help!

The cucumbers are the most abundant produce this year so far. These are the burp-less variety. I also have slicing cucumbers. One day this week I picked 9 cucumbers in one day. It seems about every 4 days or so I get a bunch.

Below is our mini-stand of corn with pole beans climbing the stalks. Jason read about this method in a book.

See the bean vine?

Black Beauty Eggplant. I made some eggplant parmesean last week for my first time.

Serrano chile peppers. These are the type of peppers Herdez uses, Jason's favorite jarred salsa. We just got a pressure cooker in the mail today so I will can our own version of Herdez.

Here was some sad news this week. A gopher got to my biggest watermelon plant. So sad... hopefully we smoked him out with a smoke bomb tossed in his tunnel. Here is a pic of the wilted plant. I thought perhaps the drip irrigation wasn't working properly in this square foot. But then I discovered the pile of dirt nearby and a hole.

Here's the watermelon that seemed to be doubling in size almost every day.

Some good melon news... the cantaloupe are doing great! Here are some fuzzy baby fruit...

Here's one quite a bit bigger...

And here's one almost ready for the picking! This is my first year with cantaloupe, watermelon, and cucumbers.

Fragrant sweet basil.

And lookey here... that is not a hose! I found this serpent this morning, just two feet away from me pulling weeds. Yikes! Any tips on how to deter snakes from a lush garden?

Look in the middle of this photo and you will see his slimy little head. Click on any photo to see it larger.

Quote by Vincent

"Sometimes God makes some really cool things. Not pretty, but cool."

~ Vincent Isaiah Poteet

Cucumber tendril

Vertical and Square Foot Gardening

Here's the beginnings of our garden this year. We decided to try out square foot and vertical gardening. Check out the source book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Square-Foot-Gardening-Garden-Space/dp/1579548563/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241843919&sr=8-3

The author claims that the pounds of food harvested per square feet are much more than the "typical" gardening. This is the first time I've worked with such an organized garden space. I do say that I like it! We went with two really long 1-square foot rows. 

So far I have planted 3 different beans, cilantro, sweet basil, Thai basil, Italian parsley, bell pepper, Italian pepper, serrano, jalapenos, Thai pepper, cantaloupe, watermelon, 2 different cucumbers, a few different tomatoes, carrot seeds, and probably more I am forgetting.

This is just next to the garden, the site of last year's jumbled garden. I still plan on prepping and planting in this "triangle" soon. Here will go the large and sprawling plants such as zucchini, corn, and pumpkin. Plus I will plant sunflowers and a zinnia flower bed.

Here are those said plants, just waiting for more dirt to dig into.