Gardening

May—The Month Of….

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Early May to say, within the last week, could easily be designated the cucumber weeks of May. I’m almost willing to call the whole month the Cucumber Month but the last week the Sumter cucumbers have waned, letting the County Fairs take over as producing the abundance of fruit. I might be able to get another round of fruit out of the Sumters but I think they are done. The County Fairs have another few weeks.

The amount of cucumbers we’ve been harvesting has been bordering on the ridiculous. I took some to Chris’ field site for the biologists and archaeologists to eat on, then he was home last week for a day and he took a grocery bag full to the food bank across the street. My parents were here this weekend and I probably sent home at least 50 cucumbers for my mom to pickle. I have enough pickles to last me the rest of the year. I may keep a few more cucumbers that come off the vine just to eat but most will likely be given to coworkers or to the food bank. We definitely harvested many more cucumbers this month than we did back in the fall.

But, if the first of May was the time of cucumbers, this last week to week and a half has become the time for tomatoes. When we first planted them I kept worrying that we just wouldn’t have enough! Texas has a narrow window for harvest and for starting them—battling freezes or frosts until late Feburary (early March in some areas of Texas) and then we have to get our harvests in before the heat of summer comes. It is quite frustrating. But, I think we managed to make the most of it so far. I’ve put away 12 jars of salsa, 6 jars of tomato jam, 12 jars of just packed tomatoes, and one batch of tomato soup I ate in the span of a couple of days. Currently I am oven drying some of the cherry/pear tomatoes and plan on making spaghetti sauce next. I need to start scouring antique shops and garage sales for cheap Mason & Ball jars.

I’m hoping most of June will be spent getting the most out of the tomatoes and starting in on the peppers!

What are you harvesting?

(Aside: sorry for the new commenting password thing. I upgraded my plugins on WordPress, my blogging platform, and apparently the Akismet spam program is not compatible with the WordPress I am currently running. I could upgrade that but I don’t have the right update of php and that is connected via my web host and I don’t know if I can change that. So, I’m going to have to see if I have the old Akismet file on my back up hard drive and reinstall—but until then the password thing is my only method of spam prevention. I was immediately over taken with spam the moment Akismet failed….it was awful! So, thanks for putting up with it. It is just copy and paste—very simple! No tricky CAPTCHA stuff. (Oh, if you are logged in with WordPress some how, you must log out for it to work.) Thanks!)

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