The year of the cucurbits
We may have to rename this
the year of the cucurbits. After giving my brother about forty
cucumbers on Monday, we nibbled all week, and still had this basket
(cucumbers on the bottom, crookneck squash on the top) to pawn off on
Bradley Friday.
Meanwhile, the
butternuts are growing like crazy. I turn their stems inward once
a week so they don't take over the aisles, and the last seven days'
growth amounted to about three feet.
At this time of year, we
spend more time picking and processing produce than anything else
garden-related. I gave away the leftover freezer contents over
the last month, and am already filling the freezer back up, adding a
few pints of green beans, six cups of corn, and seven pints of
vegetable soup this week. Since we're eating more seasonally even
in the winter, quotas are lower and I suspect we'll be giving away a
lot more excess produce as the summer progresses.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Irma and Heath --- Live traps are a good idea, although you still have to decide what to do with the animals if you catch them. Lucy has done a great job keeping critters like that out of the garden, but keeping a dog well trained can be a lot of work. Some folks go for fences, but you need to bury them in the ground to keep out groundhogs. Good luck!
Jen --- I'm still not a big fan of canning. It does have a lot of benefits, but the taste is only so-so on everything except tomatoes and apples (in my biased opinion), and taste (and the correlated nutritional profile) is my first priority. Neither Mark nor I like pickles, and since we've ditched grains and lowered our sugar consumption a lot, jam doesn't make much sense.
We still freeze in the round plastic containers. I probably ruin five or ten of them a year, but since I use hundreds, I figure that's not too bad! I just try to be careful not to drop them when frozen, and they've lasted several years so far. If I had to start over, I might go in another direction (at least choosing rectangular containers), but since I've got round containers, I'm using 'em.