Fruits of our Labor

Earlier this spring, Brian spent many nights preparing this area that was previously a flower bed and turning it in to a garden area for me. He did such a great job and I love how it turned out.
I had such high hopes for our garden this year because we have always been successful with our gardening in the past. However it soon became apparent that we were only going to have these huge, gorgeous plants and nothing else to show for our hard work. We ended up with only a handful of squash, cucumbers that were bitter and tomatoes that were just starting to ripen just before the first frost.  I purposefully planted several tomato plants so that I could make some salsa and stewed tomatoes. But I had to improvise and ended up buying tomatoes from Bountiful Baskets so that I could work on getting our food storage built back up.

 I ended up only canning 4 out of the 5 boxes after I seen how much it was actually going to make.

In all, I ended up with 34 pints of salsa and 21 quarts plus 12 pints of stewed tomatoes.

Luckily I have a great family who gave me corn from their garden so that I could can corn too.

It sure is a lot of work but is so worth it when we can eat corn this winter that tastes like its fresh from a garden rather than out of a can.