Garden Success this year

Our garden was pretty successful this year.  We ended up with lots of tomatoes, TONS of jalapenos, and yummy raspberries, plums and so many peaches.  Rob wants to do garden boxes next year.  So we might have a smaller garden while we work on those.  

Here I am in my pjs picking things from the garden. Sadie snapped this picture without me knowing.  But It shows just how crazy big the tomato plants were.  

We harvested all of our jalapenos before it froze outside, and we had a contest to see who could guess how many there were.  Finley guessed 400 and we all thought that was a crazy guess.  But she was the closest because we counted 387!  

We planted sweet potatoes that my mom gave us.  They had sprouted on her counter and then I asked her to bring them up to Utah on her next trip.  They grew in our house until we planted them in our little dirt patch in the corner of our driveway.  They were really successful!

It's like a treasure hunt digging potatoes out of the ground.  Finley loved it.  These grew really big compared to our regular potatoes.  

It was a family affair.  I didn't want to get dirty so my job was to throw the plants into the big dumpster after they pulled them out.

All of our sweet potatoes.  They are yummy.

Check out the size of this one!

We actually invited our neighbor's little boys to come help too.  They had a blast.  There were so many spiders!

Sadie hated the spiders but managed to pick lots of potatoes.

This was our first year growing melons.  The cantaloupe was delicious.  

The watermelons weren't as tasty.  But they were ok.  We got about 6 watermelons and 6 or 7 cantaloupe. 

I was able to preserve a lot of things this year.  I always have good intentions, but usually don't have the energy.  But this year I did pretty good.  Here's peach plum jam that is delightful.

I got tired of canning peaches after about 50 or 60 quarts so I borrowed a friend's juicer and juiced a bunch of them.  This was after we gave away hundreds!

Emery found a Katy-did (leaf bug) which was fun because they were learning about them that week in class.

So many peaches!  This was just one of the harvests.  We got over 600 pounds this year!  

Pretty rainbow.

Finley was very helpful with keeping me company while I picked in the garden.  Here she is with her broken arm.  So cute.

Grandma was here when we harvested our peaches.

Sadly one of our big branches split because the peaches were too heavy.  We fixed it with zip ties and hopefully it will be ok next year.

  

Rob with his harvested potatoes.  We did red, yukon gold and purple potatoes.  I think.

Riley helped with the potatoes.

 Here's a picture of just how many peaches we had.  Rob thinned so many peaches off of this tree.  Like more than 50 percent he pulled off.  Maybe even 75 percent.  But we still had so many.  And now we have lots of jars of peaches and lots of frozen peaches to use until next year!