End Of Summer Is Upon Us

written by Yvonne

I know, I know! We suck. We're the worst bloggers ever! I mean the whole point is to keep people up to date on what's going on. And if too much time passes, people lose interest, right? If that's you, I completely understand. Our main excuse for not keeping up with the blog these past three months is that not much has been going on in the Veggie Patch other than a lot of embarrassing weeds.

But that time has passed and we're getting the beds going again, thus the blog will begin again.

The post below is from a while ago but I already had the pictures so I thought I'd put some text to them anyway.

July 19, 2013

Lots of herbs growing and our dried stash from last year is getting low. So I chopped off a good bit of the basil, dill and parsley....

and hung them in bundles to dry.

Talk about smells wafting through the kitchen!

The melon vines are really taking off. We keep re-routing them to keep them out of the driveway.

The green beans took over one of the FU bushes.

The other volunteer melon is also taking off.

The cow peas are starting to latch on to the zucchini plant. The zucchini has stopped producing so it's time to rip it out and re-train the cow peas to go up the stakes.

I unwound the cow pea vines and showed them where they need to be.

It's kinda hard to see, but here are the stages of the cow peas. Stage 1: They are green and look pretty much like string beans.

Stage 2: They begin to dry out on the vine.

Stage 3: They completely dry out.

Stage 4: Shell them and put 'em up for eatin' at a later time.

 Man! Peppers are slow to mature.

But, they do mature eventually. Here is the start of a bell pepper.

As you can see the collards started to bolt so this will be the last harvest of them.

A HUGE bug greeted me when I pulled up the collards. A June bug perhaps? It was big and kinda pretty.

And speaking of bugs... WHAT THE ?@#$?! IS THIS!?!?!

Small yellow pear tomatoes doing well. Great to pop into a salad.

(OK, Stephanie. Here's your Where's Honey & Olive.)

We pulled all the rest of the beets out. I roasted most of them...

and made beet chips with a few of the larger ones. Love the beet chips but they don't stay crisp for long.  Anyone have any tips?

Had a recipe for a roasted tomato sauce that I hadn't tried so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

Drizzle olive oil over the tomato halves, sprinkle with course salt, put in a 250 oven for 7 hours. Take them out, wazz them up in the food processor with a few cloves of garlic and PRESTO, yummy tomato sauce. I ended up doing this several times with batches of tomatoes and then froze the already prepared sauce.