The “fruits” (and veggies) of my labour #LMDConnector

One of my favourite things about summer is my garden. I love growing and eating my own vegetables, and I really love teaching  my kids how to grow their own vegetables! Each year is a new experience with the garden. We always lose something to our local bunny. While this makes me sad, the kids love that we are keeping him fed! This year he enjoyed most of our radishes and a couple of pepper plants. I guess he was looking to spice up his life a bit!

We had a huge abundance of zucchini this year, that I used to make grilled zucchini, stuffed zucchini and zucchini bread. The tomatoes have also done very well this year. My Mom is a very experienced gardener, and while I was away she was here helping with the kids and maintaining my garden. I had a lot of odd coloured tomatoes in the garden that I hadn’t picked yet, and I had a few in the fridge that I had already picked. I came home to find this note from her…

FYI…

Tomatoes should never be kept in the fridge. They lose their sweet flavour when refrigerated.

Not all tomatoes turn bright red. Christmas grapes are deep red/green when ripe and are very sweet. One of your other varieties are the same colour but bigger. They will never be red.

So it’s never too late to learn something from your mother. My tomatoes are on the counter and some of them are not red! Rather than canning tomatoes, I like to just put them in the freezer in ziplock bags. When I’m ready to use them in a casserole or sauce, I take them out and defrost them. The skin just falls right off and the tomatoes practically disintegrate in the sauce.

My carrots will soon be ready to pick too, and I have enough of them that I will need to freeze some. After cleaning them, I give them a quick blanch and then freeze them. It’s super easy and they taste so much better than the carrots you can buy. The peppers, cucumbers, onions and beans generally get eaten during the summer months in our house. When I had a larger garden, I used to grow melons, pumpkins, potatoes and lettuce but I can’t fit everything into my little gardens anymore. Someday I will have to expand!

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