This week has been both a struggle and exciting in the garden.  But the sunflowers have not disappointed!

With the excessive heat warning for most days, I planned to get up and out in the garden before 7am. I spent I think 4 mornings in the garden, catching up with weeding and harvest for between an hour and an hour and half each day. The blueberries are awesome, we have been able to freeze approximately 2 gallons.  More good news is that we have several watermelons that are growing and we have started the slow trickle of tomatoes coming in. Unfortunately, I dont think we will be able to harvest enough tomatoes for making all the salsa we need.  Some of the romas are already dying out. I even tried treating for blight.  We are also losing the majority of our peppers.  We lost our first 3 squash plants to squash bugs but I am hopefully that I was able to save a couple of our zucchini plants. I do have a second wave of squash plants in front of the sunflowers so that we may get another harvest by the end of June. I also planted a couple more zucchini plants but I am not sure if we will get any more of those.  We did start to make improvements to help things out, first our drip irrigation is just not working. The parts were several years old and just is not doing it. We decided to purchase a sprinkler. It arrived today and I will let you know how it works.

Another change is we decided to purchase a 3rd green stalk planter. This year, I have attempted to start more pepper seeds and it will have 30 pepper plants. My thought is that we can move the layers to the green house if needed toward the end of the season to give us up to an additional month of growing time.  Of course it was purchased on sale!

Food Preservation
I did mange to get some things preserved this week. On Monday, I canned 4 pints of green beans from our garden. We already have 2 quarts frozen. With this addition we should have a year supply. I also have both bush and trellis green beans still growing which is exciting.
I cooked 8 packs of chicken thighs which became 4 broccoli chicken rice casseroles, 3 are in the freezer for quick meals during the school year. I also made a batch of chicken broth which was 5 quarts and 1 pint.  This is exciting!
My main focus of the week has been to clean out and organize our kitchen and pantry. For the first time since February everything has a permanent home and is not on the floor!

I know I said there would be less pictures but I could not resist adding these! These sunflowers are gorgeous!   I am waiting for the ones outside the deck to catch up.

Next up is a volunteer tomato plant. I have now discovered it is a cherry tomato plant but I don’t think i have EVER saw some many blooms on a plant.

.And we even have some tomatoes forming

Last but certainly not least I did meet my goal for the week. To can one item and to add one item to the freezer for future meals.  I was able to can 9 half pints and 4 pints of Taco meat. 2 half pints did not seal. We used one to finish up dinner and one will be use for Totachos this week.   I was able to freeze 7 prepared baked ziti this week as well!

We are harvesting squash, zucchini, a few cucumbers, peppers and green beans! I LOVE THE SUMMER!