Garden Update and some Pickles!

I haven't posted any pictures of the garden lately so I thought I'd change that this morning. The weather has been really great for growing vegetables this year. Lots of sunny warm (and hot) days with plenty of rain mixed in. Our kale has recovered well from the mystery creature and has really taken off lately.

Curly kale. Almost enough to start eating it!

I'll probably end up using some kale this week in something since it is starting to get huge and I didn't buy any cooking greens at the farmer's market this week.

Our rainbow chard is also coming along nicely. It has some brown spots on some of the older leaves but I'm hoping the newer leaves will be spared.

Also, you get a nice view of our creature-proof fencing...

Our zucchini and squash went from grow-as-many-leaves-as-you-possibly-can mode to produce-as-much-fruit-as-you-possibly-can in about a week. I was starting to wonder if they were going to flower at all and all of a sudden BANG:

This happens:

zucchini

 butternut squash and my hand for scale

They're so cute with the flowers still attached and all miniature. 

I wasn't as worried about the tomatoes since they were at least flowering. Now I'm a little worried about what we're going to do with all these tomatoes. I think there is a lot of salsa and pasta sauce in my future.

Mmmm...heirloom tomatoes!

Here's a nice before-and-after shot of our peas/peppers/butternut squash bed:

Before (July 4, 2011):

After (July 23, 2011):

That squash is just going crazy in just 20 days! And my ornamental sweet peas have flowers all over the place and the peppers are much bigger. Pretty amazing really.

My other big achievement this weekend was completing my first attempt at canning! I made plain old dill pickles. I followed the easiest recipe in this book: Ball's Complete Book of Home Preserving. I did a little tweaking but not much since I am in unfamiliar territory here. At least I finally used up those pickling cukes I got last week at the farmer's market!

They look nice at least! Hopefully they won't kill anyone.

It wasn't too much work, and doing a small batch let me work out some of the kinks. I definitely need to start simmering my jars (for the pre-fill sterilization) much earlier next time! My next project will be pickling the zucchini. I also got a bunch of summer squash (the yellow kind) at the farmer's market this weekend so I might throw that in with the zucchini if that is doable so I get some nice green and yellow squashes in the jars. I also bought some more raspberries this week. I just can't help myself!

No tomatoes at the market this week...I can't wait to make some salsa and pasta sauce!

Also, I baked some more wheat bread....but more on that later I hope. That's all for now.