This post gave me an idea to make some tomato basil bites of my own (my wife actually put this together). Served on toasted bread with vinaigrette dressing, they were awesome!

Whatever this is can’t be good. My summer squash plants look a little off. And in possibly related other news, I’m standing ankle deep in water next to the garden beds.

Another two inches of rain last night. Yard is flooded again. At least I have an excuse not to mow: I don’t have a snorkel for my lawn mower.

Here are my gardens, swimming in the swamp that is my yard.

Rained Out

I found this recipe while searching for something to do with all of the zucchini that I have been harvesting. It sounded pretty good since I like chili, and I really want to use as much of the zucchini as I can. We made it this evening (with the added garbanzo beans) and it was awesome! The next batch will have a little more spice, but this was good none-the-less!

I canned some salsa, green beans, and more pickles this weekend. For the pickles, I used the same recipe as before. For the salsa, I used a recipe from the Ball website. I like salsa that is mostly vegetables. Basically, I won’t make any with a recipe that calls for sugar or anything extra other than spices. I found the bean recipe from a Costco magazine. It contains essentially the same thing as dill cucumber pickles with cayenne pepper added. I can’t wait to try these in a few weeks!

More canned goods

They weren’t kidding. These tomatoes are huge. I picked them a little green as the chipmunks were eyeing them up.

Monster tomatoes

I left town for a week and harvested this (plus four extremely large zucchini) when I returned. I think I am going to have to can salsa and pickles this weekend or else give some of it away.

Harvest 8/6/2010

I attempted to can some of the cucumbers and zucchini last weekend. I followed the instructions exactly, but am still leery. The top are still down, so that is a good sign. I guess we’ll see if I am still alive in a few weeks when I get to open one and give it a try. The blueberry jam was made from berries picked at a pick-your-own farm in Iowa City.

First attempt at canning.

Putting the cucumber plants behind (to the north of) the broccoli plants I think caused them to be a little delayed. The broccoli basically shaded the cucumbers until the broccoli plants were pulled out. Also, eight broccoli plants was probably too much, but I don’t know what a suitable early maturing replacement would be to get something out of the vacant spaces around the squash before they get too big.