In the fruit garden (which we put new fence posts around this year and re-did the netting to keep the deer out), there is rhubarb, strawberries, 3 kinds of raspberries, and 2 peach trees.
In the vegetable garden this year we grew 3 rows of corn, 2 kinds of potatoes, 2 kinds of onions (the red ones didn't grow though--that's the 2nd time we've tried growing them and they haven't had success), radishes, and mini pumpkins.
In our backyard, we also have 2 apple trees, 1 cherry tree, and 1 plum tree. We used to have a pear tree, too, but I hate pears, and it was becoming too much work to keep it, so we cut it down last year. The cherry tree grows pie cherries, and we picked enough to make a cherry dessert early in the summer (which I've already blogged about). The transparent apple tree bears fruit every other year, and I usually make applesauce with the abundant fruit, but this year the apples were ripe at the end of July and the beginning of August instead of the end of August, and I had no time to do it because of my college classes and vacations we had scheduled during that time. We ate a few of the apples fresh, gave some to the neighbors, and delivered some to the neighbor's pigs. The other apple tree grows red apples, and they were ripe in September, but there were so few of them this year that I didn't do anything with them. The plum tree didn't bear any fruit this year, which I was kind of sad about. Last year, it grew 3 plums (it's a young tree), and I wonder if it will be an every-other-year fruit-growing tree like the large apple tree or if it just didn't have a successful year growing fruit because of some munching on it's lower branches from the deer early in the season.
I trimmed the raspberries way back early this spring to promote a healthier raspberry patch, and because of that, the raspberries didn't start growing until July. The very first picking was at the end of July, and there were very few of them:
After that, we started picking some about twice a week for the next 3 months. They were growing until the end of October! Kanyon liked to help me pick them. Last year, his favorite to eat were the golden raspberries, but this year, he changed his mind and would only eat the red ones. The few Bear Lake Raspberry plants we have didn't grow very much, but we are hoping they will finally start bearing fruit next year.
There was never enough raspberries picked to make any jam with, but we would fill a bowl, or the bottom of an ice cream container every time. We've never had so many raspberries in one year, and I'm hoping that next year it will even be more so that I can start making my own freezer jam with them!
Josh, Kanyon and I usually just ate them fresh. But I did make smoothies with them a few times, because EVERYONE would eat them in that form!
Our strawberries are also young--we just planted them a year ago. They grew a few fruit, but the birds ate them early in the season. I put netting over them after that to protect them, but they never grew any more fruit after that this year. I'm also hoping that they will start producing more next year! Barb grew a TON of them this year, and she was kind enough to bring us some from her garden a few times throughout the summer, and they were delicious! She also brought us some fresh green beans from her garden, which we thoroughly enjoyed. I made a crockpot meal using the green beans, some of our own potatoes, and ham, which was super delicious!
I wasn't able to stay on top of the rhubarb in our fruit patch either. I cut a few pieces early in the summer and simmered them into a sauce which I put on ice cream, pancakes, and dipped cheese in (I know it sounds weird, but I love cheese and fruit mixed). But after that, the rhubarb shriveled up because I stopped picking it (this whole working-my-butt-off-on-college-work in the summer has taken a precedence the last two summers and has had a big effect on my extra-curricular activities, like gardening).
The most exciting thing for me that came out of our fruit garden this year were the peaches. I've been looking forward to our peach trees growing fruit for years. We originally planted apricot trees in the garden, but then the deer ate so much of them that they died (we've found a wild apricot tree that grows on the hillside down the road, though, so we are still able to partake of that fruit if we take a walk to go get it--which we did in July). So then we planted peach trees in their place, but last year, the deer ate a lot of one of the trees and stunted its growth. I was so happy when I could see fruit actually growing on the trees this year for the first time! And the bigger peach tree grew a TON of them. Surprisingly, even the smaller tree grew a few, too. I thought they would never ripen, though--they seemed to stay in the green phase forever. It was strange that the apple and cherry tree cycles were so much ahead of schedule this year, but the peach trees cycle was much slower than I anticipated. Everyone else's peach trees in town ripened about a month ahead of mine. Thankfully, we had a warm fall (a freeze would've killed them before they were ready to be picked), and they were finally ready to be picked at the end of September.
I picked two full baskets of them. Within a week of being inside, they were ripe and ready to eat. I ate them for breakfast with a bowl of milk, ate one or two every day with my lunch, ate same after school for a snack, and made several desserts with them as well. They were SOOOO delicious!!
Unfortunately, nobody else besides me and Kanyon would eat them fresh, and I wasn't going through them fast enough, and some started to spoil. Whenever I would make them into a dessert, however, everyone in the family would partake of them. So I made at least 5 desserts with the peaches, which seemed to be the most efficient way to eat them!
The vegetable garden had a successful year growing corn and potatoes. The onions didn't grow as well as in years past, though. We only had about 20 yellow onions that we picked. We use them a lot when we cook hamburger to flavor the meat, and I've already used half of what we grew in meals. I ate about half the radishes we grew; I really like them fresh, and I put some in salads, too. I like how radishes grow so quickly, but I never remember to grow a second crop of them to have them all summer long! We started digging up potatoes in August, and dug them up a few times for different meals, and then waited until the end of September to dig up the rest. We have two full 50-pound bags: one has Yukon potatoes, and the other has Red potatoes. Yukon store better, but Red make creamier mashed potatoes. Jonah and Micah did most of the work weeding and digging them up all by themselves. They were the vegetable garden weeders this summer, and did a great job. I was in charge of weeding the raspberry garden, I helped them with the onion rows, and I helped Kanyon weed the pumpkin patch as well.
We ate corn on the cob several times in August and September. That is one of our favorite meals at the end of summer! We noticed the birds were starting to peck at them on the stalks, so on Labor Day, we picked all the corn, shucked it all, and I made 31 quarts of freezer corn. There were a lot of ears that had been partially eaten by the birds, but we just cut those parts off and were still able to get a lot of edible corn out of it. It was an all-day affair to make the freezer corn, but well worth the work!
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