The radishes were great but alas they are all gone. The basil is resurrecting for another go-round.

Enjoy - we have the most amazing herbs this year and some of your stuff as well.

bagged and froze about three dozen tomatoes. They will be in next winter's chili and marinara sauce.

70'X'50' back yard garden here. Tomatoes, peppers, green beans, okra, basil, chives, watermelon, apples, sunflowers, egg plant, onions, swiss chard, zucchini, rhubarb, beets, potatoes, butternut squash, and probably a few things I'm forgetting.

OP, that spaghetti squash will keep for a long time after you pick it in the fall. I grew some a few years ago and we ate it all winter. Just keep it in a cool dark place. Same with butternut squash. Also, take up canning - long term storage using no energy. For dinner I just had a jar of tomato basil soup from last summer. We also canned around 50 quarts of tomato juice. Lots of my friends grow gardens also and we meet at the local coffee shop and give things away/trade with each other.

Good looking stuff you've got there.

that I slow roasted in olive oil and froze. Man, was that the way to go. They made magnificent sauce.

This year I have no garden space

My wife is now marinating them in olive oil or something, for sauce and for good eatin'!

Last year was our first real garden, and we canned a lot of tomatoes and salsas, as well as some peaches and apples we picked nearby.

This year we really went for it. The weather has been perfect in CT, the plants love it...and are producing far faster than we can keep up with. The canning will start again soon! We've already started pickling the cukes and making cucumber salads and in Vietnamese dishes. My wife spent the winter scouring the Vermont countryside for organic, local seeds and it's paying off. We have Cinderella pumpkins, Jack O' Lanterns, a couple of different watermelons, all sorts of squash, 50 tomato plants of different varieties, every pepper you can imagine, plus a couple huge trellises of green beans. And friendly flowers to keep the bugs away. 100% organic. We even have an artichoke this year, already has three 'choke's on it!

Bloody Mary mix. We made Bloody Mary gift baskets for some friends at Christmas consisting of our mix, a bottle of Vodka, some gourmet olives, pickled carrots (more of our canning), you get the idea.

I never would of thought of it, but she found fancy canning jars, wrapped them in bows and made some special salt to rim the glasses (like you do with a margarita). They were great gifts...and we had a few left over to take on snowboard trips!

not that chemical filled crap you get from the chain stores.
That's a good looking red pepper you got there.

We get veggies from the CSA during the summer and into early fall. I love it.

by the way, as far as the spaghetti squash goes--I have had good luck in baking and shredding it, and then freezing it in small quantities (like I do with zucchini.) works well.

Family of four and we freeze and store quite a bit, kids are herbivores so it all gets eaten. Just harvested garlic and it is curing right now. Will last through the spring. Our beans are late due to cold summer weather this year, rabbits, and procrastination. Enjoy.!

Is just jumping out of that photo. This is something a garden can give you that you can't get any other way. In NJ, we have a couple grocery store chains that try very hard to deliver fresh, but there's nothing as fresh as from your own garden and there never will be.

Since this is a gardener's thread and we've all heard the stories about zucchinis at this time of year, I would like to alert everyone to this recipe for zucchini crust pizza. It is way better than any wheat crust you'll ever make. If you've grown from organic zucchini seed (heirloom variety preferred), that means you'll be having something that's not genetically modified or messed with in hybridization, as is a wheat crust pizza.

I make this zucchini crust pizza every single week. Wouldn't be without it.





Cher

That is one of my favorites.

The typeset looks like her first recipe book. If so, I better dig my copies up, as I may have over-looked a great thing!

For all the zucchini I've had success with this year (manage and volunteer a food garden for the local pantries), I thought, "Maybe I should have a few more recipes to leave with them." Often people need clues at pantries as to how they can enhance the healthy and organic produce someone leaves for them. Maybe I SHOULD look at what I could have been making, too!

We've got corn, beans, about 30 squash plants, greens out the ass, beets jumping out of the ground, lettuces, herbs, tomatoes, tomatatillos, lots of different peppers, carrots, turnips...I'm sure I'm forgetting something.

Oh, blueberries, red raspberries, gold raspberries, grapes. Cucumbers. Zucchini.

I planted some really gnarly heirloom winter squash varieties. Can't wait for those.

Oh, and there's a giant blackberry bramble just across the field. It's high season right now. I pick a pint or two or three every day. Freeze some of 'em and have smoothies all winter.

If the system crashed tomorrow, we wouldn't go hungry.

I'm a battle-scarred veteran of the "back to the land" thing in the 70's and 80's.

I raised - in small quantities - hogs, cattle, goats, geese, ducks, chickens, turkeys, guineas.. I dunno what else.

I had a huge garden. As organic as I could make it.

Sold the "gentleman's farm" in 1998 and moved to a rural area with a city-sized lot. Done with all that work!

So what if I planted a couple of dwarf fruit trees... and a small raised-bed, no-till garden? Simple stuff...beans, zukes, spaghetti squash, broccoli...like that.

The next year... another dwarf fruit tree. And another small raised bed.

You see where this is going, right? More years, more raised beds. At least I don't till the damn things.

This year the goddam raspberries would NOT quit. The "dwarf" plum tree went ape-shit with fruit. My dwarf apple tree gave me over 100 lbs!! of apples last year. The spaghetti squash wants to take over the yard.

I found some yellow Romano-type beans we really like, and I have grown too many of those, too. Eggplant, strawberries... they've all gone nuts.

At least I don't have any of that damned Lawn stuff.

Talk me down from this craziness!

... and salmon.... and lingcod...and halibut.

North end of Puget Sound is FULL of seafood.