My busy day!!!

Today was a busy today.  In the morning we spent time together as a family and then while my daughter was sleeping I got to work on my garden.  My list for the day was:

• pull up squash

•  plant all of my fall vegetables

• weed

•   make pickles

   Overall I would say I had a very productive day.  I had about three hours to myself to tend to my garden.  I was able to pull up all my summer squash and zucchini. Sadly, the powdery mildew had taken over and the plants had slowed their production.  I had used Serenade Organic Fungicide  a few times and had seemed to slow the mildew but these last few days have been killer on my squash. About a month ago I planted some spaghetti squash and I don't want the mildew to kill those plants so I thought it was best to remove the others.

     I weeded and took out all of the dead pea plants and cucumber plants.  We have quite an extensive compost pile so I tilled in some fresh soil and  organic fertilizer. I planted some sugar snap peas on both of my A frames.  My beans are still producing so I left them on one side of an A frame.  The sugar snap pea packet says they take about 65 days so hopefully I timed them right and I will have sugar snap peas in October.  I also was able to plant 3 different types of lettuce (Salad Bowl, Buttercrunch, and Butterhead)and ruby red Swiss Chard.  I gave about 9 square feet to the lettuce.  I am still doing some research as to whether it would be better to put up my green house or just purchase some hoop houses and cover my raised beds.  Over the next few weeks the local farms or garden center will start selling their cold weather crops.  Most likely I'll look for some spinach, cabbage,beets, collards and kale.


I ran out of time so I wasn't able to make any more pickles.  However we did sneak a taste of the pickles we made last week.  Wow, were they delicious!  What was interesting was that each pickle had a slightly different taste.  They all were incredibly sour but some had more garlic and others had a strong dill taste.  We will let the other jars sit for a few more days.  My husband realized that we don't have enough Mason jars so he will purchase them tomorrow and after work we will get canning!

Hubby took care of making dinner  tonight and boy did he deliver.  He used two of our large zucchini and made a delicious stuffing.  Every year when we go camping our friends make stuffed squash that basically has cheese, seasoned salt, and butter.  The recipe that my husband found on the food network is a suped up  version.  The only substitution to the recipe is that he used ground Linguica instead of sausage.   Click here for the recipe from the Food Network