What To Do With What Is In Our Garden

This year, we are growing onions, garlic, melon, roma and cherry tomatoes, long hot peppers and tomatillos in our garden.  We also have our staman apple tree and an asian pear tree.

Our garden recently started to produce crops - tomatoes (cherry and roma), onions and some staman apples from our tree.  Our kids locate and pick our produce to bring them in for washing and preparing.

Now the question is what to do with all that our garden produces this year.


This year, I am going to try canning our tomatoes rather then freezing them so that we can make them last longer and be easier to work with rather then being mush.  I am going to blanch them, take off their skins and can them.  We will continue to dice and freeze our onions from our garden (as we do with those we purchase from grocery stores) for use with future meals.  We find that this has been working well for our family when meal time rolls around.


The staman apples have not been lasting very long.  It seems like once they are picked, the kids and I eat them up pretty quick.

I am hoping to get enough apples from our tree this season to make at least one apple pie.  Last year was the first year we had our tree and it gave us one apple, well half an apple because our youngest decided to hit it with his stick when he was fighting it.  This years abundance of apples is an unexpected and welcome change.


It looks like our tomatillos and asian pears are coming along great.  Our peppers do not seem be going very well.  Our strawberry plants look like they are coming along but no fruit yet.


This year like last year, we will continue to share what our garden produces with friends and with people in our community.  Last year, we shared bags of tomatoes and some jalapeno peppers.   Some people used them in chili, some in stews, some in salsa, some fried green tomatoes and so on.