Another Day of Gardening & Preserving

It was quite the productive day for me today.  It started with the garden.

I grabbed some lettuce and picked the ripe tomatoes (not many, sadly), bell peppers (well, only one), green & purple beans, and snow peas.  Then I pulled the mature beets.  I trimmed the beets by putting the leaves in one pile, the stalks in another pile, and the beets in a third.

After washing, this is what I pulled from the garden today:

From the upper left, clockwise:

• Beet greens
• Beets
• Beet Greens
• Lettuce
• Green & purple beans, Snow peas, tomatoes, red bell pepper
• Beet stalks

The lettuce will just get eaten by the kids and Joel. I use the larger leaves for "wraps" for myself, as I can't really handle plain greens (they make me feel uncomfortable).

The bowl of beans, peas, etc were used tonight in a stir-fry (except for the tomatoes).

The beet stalks are going to be made into a relish. I found a recipe for Swiss Chard Relish, so I'm subbing out the beet stalks for the chard stalks.

The beets are going to be canned tomorrow. I have more in the garden so I wait for those to mature and then I'll pickle them.  From the canning process, I'll have some beet stock, so I will can that, too.

The beet greens were blanched, chopped, and then frozen into muffin trays (then later bagged).  Each "muffin" is about 3 ounces frozen.  I'll use them like frozen spinach.

I made a pot of vegetable stock tonight. I keep all my non-stinky veggie scraps in a Ziploc in the freezer. When I have enough, I make a batch of stock. Tonight's batch made 6 litres.

I also made a couple of batches of jam from the raspberries Isabella and I picked yesterday.  I made some Sugar-Free Raspberry Jam (sweetened with Splenda) for myself, and I made Raspberry-Blueberry Jam, too (not sugar-free).

Tomorrow will be busy, too.  My plan is to make the relish, can the beets and the beet stock, bake a loaf of bread and some banana bread (there are 3 overripe bananas waiting to be used).