As you can see, our peach tree has produced so many peaches this year (this is only a small amount of the peaches we’ve picked) that we’ve started to jar them to enjoy during the winter.

We’re enjoying cucumbers, cherry peppers, jalapeno peppers, cherry tomatoes and one of my favorites, string beans. This year we’re also having great luck with basil. The jars in the back are sun dried tomatoes (bought since it’s too humid here to dry them ourselves) sandwiched with our fresh basil under oil. This makes a great snack with a nice hunk of bread. The top jar is full of seeds from our amazing dill plants. Unfortunately our favorite organic farm didn’t get a good crop of pickling cukes this year, so it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to make pickles.

We’ve also started jarring gardiniera or pickled vegetables – a great Italian appetizer. There’s nothing like opening up a jar in the dead of winter and enjoying the taste of fresh vegetables that we grew in our garden.

Talk about low carbon footprint for our organic food!

Even with this summer’s almost continuous rain, our garden is still doing well. Our big excitement right now is our plum trees. Last year was the first year we were able to taste any plums. 2 plums to be exact. Wasps laid eggs in the small plums and ate them from the inside out. This year we research kaolin clay (the base for Kaopectate) and mixed the powder with water to create a barrier so the wasps would decide to lay their eggs elsewhere. As you can see from the photo, it worked! We have a plethora of plums.

We’ve taken to calling them “plurries” since they are small plums but bigger than cherries. They may be small, but they taste just as delicious as those plums from my childhood and I’m having a ball eating them while the juice drips down my arm!