Garden update

So, this is the year that both the tomatoes and the cucumbers went all-in.  I've got somewhere around fifteen pounds of tomatoes on the table right now, and that's after three batches of salsa and one of ketchup.

tomatoes on the dining room table

The ketchup was not a difficult process, just long, and I'm getting a food mill so that when I make sauce I can get all the seeds out.

thickening the ketchup

This was also a summer of squash.  We ate a lot of it, and there's a couple on the counter that we either need to eat or they're going to get composted soonish.

so many squash

The cucumbers went hard for about three weeks and then slowed down to a slightly faster than we can eat trickle.  The first thing I made was relish.

sweet relish before adding the vinegar

I ended up making three kinds of pickles besides relish: sweet spears, dill spears, and dill slices.  It took me a while to find reasonably-priced pickle crisp, so only the dill spears got it.

sweet pickle spears

Besides the garden, I moved the planters to the patio this year and put flowers in them.  Apparently monarchs like zinnias?  I'll probably plant more of these next year since they've been pretty prolific and low-maintenance.

zinnias with butterfly