You know that summer is in full swing when the cucumbers are ready!

Sweet Refrigerator Pickles

• 4 wide mouth pint mason jars
• 1 head of dill per pint
• 3-4 slicing cucumbers
• 1 large onion
• 2 banana peppers (or hot peppers)
• 4 cloves garlic
• 2 cups white vinegar
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tsp mustard seeds
• 1 tsp salt

Place a bunch of dill (we used the heads, with immature seeds – but the leaves work well too) in each pint jar.  Thinly slice cucumbers, onion, peppers, and garlic and pack jars tightly.  Bring vinegar, sugar, mustard seeds, and salt to a boil. Fill jars with liquid, cover, and refrigerate 2-4 days.  Enjoy!

Last weekend I was getting kind of sick of our composting system (piling up compost behind the garden and blocking it off with skids so that Puck won’t eat it), and so I built this. It is made out of untreated 1×4 and 1×6 pine boards. Chris treated it with linseed oil after it was built. I picked up the boards in the standard/less than perfect pile for next to nothing at Menard’s last Saturday.

I’ve been neglecting our blog a bit because I’ve been very busy working… and also, we are planning a kitchen remodel this month! This means that during prime canning and freezing time, we won’t have a working kitchen in our house. Hmm. Not sure if that will be an issue or not.

I finally ripped out all of my zucchini plants, and planted peas where they were. Hopefully we’ll have sugar snap peas in September and October, if the frost holds off long enough!

I’ve been incredibly busy with work, and the garden seems to change faster than I have time to spend in it!

We have cauliflower, broccoli, turnips, potatoes, beans … and by the time 5:00 roles around, all I want to do is crack open a cold beer and not think about making dinner. I’m going to try and make scalloped turnips tonight – but I think we might be out of soy milk. I’ll take some pictures and post the recipe when I do!

If you’ve ever tried your hand at growing heirloom tomatoes … then chances are you’ve run across Early Tomato Blight.

Early tomato blight is an infection (caused by the fungus Alternaria solani) that starts out as dark brown spots, yellowing leaves, and eventually spreads quite rapidly through the crop killing the leaves and fruits if it has a chance. The fungus spores form in hot, humid weather and then wait for a nice, cool, wet evening to start destroying the plants. We’ve definitely had more than ideal weather for blight this summer. It shows up just as the plants are starting to set fruit – and once the infection starts, it is nearly impossible to stop from spreading. If you’re growing organically and aren’t planning on dousing them with fungicide, that is.

Unfortunately, we didn’t move the old bean and cucumber trellises with us, and I didn’t have the scrap wood (or the ambition) this year to build something new.

Menard’s sells 10′ PVC Pipes for 97¢. Five of those, plus a bit of hemp twine, makes a really nice bean teepee. I dug each pole 1 foot into the ground to make sure the winds wouldn’t take them down this summer.

We ordered a Nichols plum tree and Goldrush and Williams Pride apple trees from One Green World.  They came in last week, but I forgot to call to get the lines marked beforehand so we had to wait to plant them.  They sat in the crawlspace and the plum tree decided to flower.  All are semidwarf and disease resistant varieties.  Goldrush ripens late and William’s Pride early.  We planted them by our crabapple trees in the front yard – hopefully they’ll get enough sun!

I didn’t think the asparagus was going to come up, but all the rain recently must have done it some good.  Its planted in the far corner my my garden plot next to the compost and past the strawberries.

He also is really good about staying in the garden paths. Here he’s found a small patch of shade from the arbor.

Two weeks later we finished spreading the compost and tilling the garden.

Jessi’s half is on the left; Chris’s half is on the right. Let the games begin!

Last year, we amended our new, sandy garden with seven pickup truck loads of compost from the Free Compost Site in our county.

Since then, the truck was sold for $300 (it was worth nearly every penny, too…), we moaned and groaned about the sand, and had a mediocre garden.