This post is probably boring to everyone but me, so you have my permission to move on. But if you like gardens and knowing totals, you might find one information here:
In thinning the carrots, I picked about 3 gallons when the stems were off. That made 10 jars of pickles carrots. And boy are they pretty with all the different colors in there. Note to self, Cosmo purple aren’t great for canning. I took a risk and left the skins on just to hilight the purple that is only on the outside and they are still orange when canned, but the brine is red-tinted. Not worth it. However the atomic red are pinkish in the jar, and make a nice addition. I haven’t found too many of them, yet. And they don’t really scream red, but in a jar full of real orange, yellows, and whites, they’re different and elegant.
The lunar white carrots taste amazing, but they kept getting rooty and seedy. Not cool. I guess I can’t say for sure if was the lunar whites, it could have been the mystery whites from the Sow Easy packet.
I will have to go thin them again (or at least harvest them) but it was nice to harvest and get the canning ball rolling. And my preschooler that hates carrots will now eat them… In pickled form.
I really want to find a way to plant carrots so I don’t have as much early thinning. I tried mixing them with sand this year and it didn’t work, I still ended up with bald spots and over-crowded spots that I wasted tiny seedlings. And with the sand, I ended up with carrots all over my garden from seeds not staying in their spot.
I thinned the beets, too. I planted Detroit Dark Red and Ruby Queen. My family has always done Detroit Dark Red… But I might be a traitor because Ruby Queen has grown amazingly and they’re so much easier to peel. It’s already time to harvest the Ruby Queen beets, but the Detroit Dark Red can stay longer. There is definitely a difference in color. One is really purple compared to the other.
I got 6 1/2 pints. I can’t remember how many gallons of just roots from harvesting, though.
And oh the peas! My peas have been crazy this year. I planted 4 rows, 6″, 12″, and 6″ apart like I usually do… And I’m not gonna do that again. Usually they don’t come up so well and then I have some on either side of my string trellis and it works out. Next year, I will plant them with a walkway between them. Or at least use better string/twine! They snapped the string and I had to deal with vining swampy peas. No fun. But I got 6 harvests of 2 gallons each! And I’m still getting about a gallon every few days now.
How many have I managed to get in the freezer? Um… 1/2 a gallon of just peas, and 1/2 a gallon of peas and baby carrots from my first thinning. The rest have gone into just about every meal I’ve made over the summer. Or straight into little mouths. Am I complaining about that? Not in the slightest. But it tells me that 4 rows is my minimum.
However, green beans… I planted those darn things twice and something keeps eating the new sprouts! I even placed forks in the rows to keep things out and they eat around the forks. Which makes me think that field mice really like bean sprouts. So I bought 11 lbs from my friend and it made 27 pints.
My other purchase for canning so far has been cherries. I thought I’d missed them, and wasn’t willing to pay upwards of $5 per lb, so I didn’t think I’d get to use my new cherry pitter this year. Then I was walking down the produce aisle at the grocery store and saw cherries for $1.99/lb! I snatched up 4 bags (couldn’t bring myself to get more) and filled the jars half full (I want to use the juice just as much as the cherries), boiled the pits (for not nearly long enough) to get more meat/juice off of them (eventually I’ll have a steam juicer) and put about 3/4 a cup of what I had boiled in each jar, filling the rest with simple syrup of 1:4 (sugar:water). I hope they’re not too sweet, I used internet suggestions. It made 13 qts, so 2 lbs per batch. Remember, that’s about half full, though.
And, as a note to myself, I made a video of my garden, but I don’t want to add it here because it has identifying location features.
