Peak Gardening Season

I’m left alone to attend to the house while my spouse is helping her sister. She’s been gone three weeks, and a return date is uncertain. I made a care package of garden produce, a couple boxes of rags, and my labor for some heavy lifting last Wednesday. We had a good conversation about life after the work was done.

The main August activity centers on the garden. There is a lot of food to bring in and preserve for the future. It never seems a straight line on getting things done.

Apples are dropping at the rate of one every minute from the Earliblaze trees. I picked a bucket full, yet there is not enough sugar in them to make cider for vinegar. I guess I’ll sauce them. If it is a bit tart, we can add a sweetener when we open the jars and serve. This was not a good variety of tree to plant back in the 1990s and I have two of them. The Zestar! apples, from a tree planted a couple of years ago, made a great-tasting sauce. That jar is in the refrigerator for immediate eating.

The first round of hot peppers is in and needs processing. The goal is to make at least one quart jar of Guajillo chilies with garlic, maybe two. There are also Serrano peppers for eating fresh and another kind of refrigerated chili sauce. Jalapenos will be eaten fresh. Anticipating a fresh salsa, I bought a bag of organic corn chips at the wholesale club. Once we get past the hot times, there will be a surge of hot peppers.

There is a small patch of celery to bring in. These get sliced thinly and frozen in one cup batches for soup. The leaves are abundant. I put them in the food processor to chop them and then freeze with water in small batches in a muffin pan for soup flavoring. Nothing is so good as home grown celery.

Tomato canning is on deck for the weekend. There are a dozen quarts left from last year and it looks like I’ll need them to get through the year. I’ll have a separate post later about the tomato crop. The ones that are coming in from the vines have had excellent flavor.

It is more difficult to cook for one. I made a big cut vegetable salad and it lasted for days. A person can only eat so many vegetables. I’ve been donating to the food pantry, so that helps alleviate the backlog. Still, there is a lot to process this weekend before the vegetables deteriorate. Better get after it soon.