Until Next Year...

Over the weekend we harvested the last of our garden for the season: tomatoes, zucchini and a few small onions.  My birthday was on Saturday, and it seems that every year my birthday is the turning point between summer and fall.  We still have some kale (lacianato and Red Russian) and broccoli that I will leave in the ground and keep picking until the plants or I give up.  Apparently kale tastes sweeter after a nip of frost anyway.  I actually feel lucky to have harvested what I did this year.  With the addition of toddler Molly this year, I just didn't have the time or energy to spend in the garden like I have in years past.  The weather was also cooler than usual this summer, so the plants didn't do as well as they usually do.  However, considering the little time I did spend gardening, I am thankful for what we ended up with!  I'm already dreaming of next spring; hopefully we will have tons of asparagus and strawberries again next year. 

Even though it seems like our garden didn't produce as much as usual this year, I am thankful I was able to take advantage of our local farmers markets to buy extra fresh fruits and vegetables in season and mostly organic so that I could preserve them (relatively inexpensively) for our long, cold winter in Michigan.

This is what I froze this year:

::  Corn, blanched and cut from the cob

::  Strawberries (ours)

::  Blueberries

::  Zucchini, some grated, some diced (many were ours)

::  Green and red peppers, diced

::  Three kinds of pesto:  basil, basil/parsley and basil/spinach

And this is what I canned this year:

::  Spaghetti sauce (some tomatoes were ours)

::  Jalapeno salsa

::  Cayenne jalapeno salsa

::  Habanero jalapeno salsa

::  Dill pickles

::  My grandma's sweet pickles

::  Danish cherry sauce

::  Strawberry sauce (our strawberries)

::  Strawberry lemon marmalade (our strawberries)

::  Low sugar cherry jam

::  Summer solstice jam

::  Peach jam

::  Low sugar peach jam

::  Peach and honey jam (this was before our honey harvest)

::  Honey apple butter (our honey)

::  Cherry chutney
::  Low sugar blueberry maple jam
::  Grape juice (our grapes)

We also have some potatoes from our garden, tomato juice canned by my parents and green beans and stewed tomatoes canned by my father-in-law.  95% of the fruit and vegetables that we put away for the winter were grown either by us, our parents, my grandfather or the farmers at the farmers market.  It's good to know where your food comes from!  I'm always looking for new ideas for preserving fruits and vegetables.  What kinds of produce did you preserve this year?