As promised, this post will be all about how we put up all of our garden bounty!

Of course, we used a lot of all of that produce as soon as we brought it in the house.

FRESH!

It has ruined me forever when it comes to buying produce at the grocery store.

It is just not the same!

One of my favorite things we used fresh were the pansies!

Pansies are edible, and we would put them on our salads.

It made them so pretty!

This watermelon balsamic salad, by the way, is DELICIOUS.

We also ate our strawberries fresh this year.

There were enough to freeze some, but we ate them anyway!

I cannot wait to get a fresh start on a strawberry patch this next year.

I also loved using the cabbage right away!

We do eat fermented food everyday – especially me – so I enjoyed making fermented cabbage.

There is nothing like cutting open a cabbage you picked two minutes earlier!!

The crunch, the air in it – they are so yummy!

We did pull the rest of the cabbage at the end of the growing season and bagged them for the fridge.

I am still using them, and they are still in perfect condition!

We have never grown cabbage before.

It is on my list already for next year – we love having it.

I also fermented about half of our jalapeño peppers.

The other half we kept whole and put them in the freezer in zip loc bags.

These fermented jalapeños were a hit!

I was hoping to put up five gallon sized bags of green peppers in the freezer.

I am thankful to say that we got that many!

And that is even after using so many as an ingredient in our canned salsa and pickle relish!!

We would just wash them, seed them, quarter them, and double bag them for the freezer.

First, though, when we would bring peppers in from the garden, we would just loosely bag them, cut big holes in the bags, and put them in the fridge until we were ready to deal with them.

This method worked perfectly and kept our peppers fresh for weeks!

We pulled our leeks at the end of the growing season.

I cut the green tops off, cleaned them in the garden hose really well, dried them really well, and bagged them for the fridge.

They keep well like this!

We are still using them and they are in perfect shape.

We love to use leeks in soups – it gives soup the most delicious flavor!

We pulled our onions the same day as the leeks, if I remember correctly!

We always lay them out to cure before storing them.

Our onions did not do as well this year as last year, but we already think we know why.

And we wrote it down in our binder, of course!

Even though these onions were little, they are delicious.

We are still using them!

We have had three so far that have gotten bad and had to be thrown away – but otherwise they are still great!

You guys, this is testing my memory, ha, ha.

I have to keep jumping up, find Tate, and ask him questions!

I was right in thinking that pickles was the first thing we canned.

They were delicious, by the way, and gone faster than fast.

This was the only batch of pickles we made – you will soon see why!

We found something much better.

Anyway – we made these four lonely jars of pickles – with just picked cucumbers.

We heard if you use the freshest unrefrigerated cucumbers that your pickles will stay crisp.

It’s true!

So four jars it was!

Unfortunately, one of those jars exploded in the canner.

That was the day that we decided we needed all new jars for this canning adventure that we were on.

We were currently using the jars from the farm, which was eight plus years ago already!

After those pickles, we were on a roll!

The cucumbers were coming in faster than we could deal with them!

So we decided to try our hand at relish.

I knew we would use relish a lot.

It was a good decision!

The only bad decision was making our first batch in such tiny  jars.

We got smart, and our next batches were in quart jars.

We just had some of this with our lunch today and it is SO good.

This also was one recipe we were using green peppers in.

It seemed to take literally forever for our tomatoes to ripen this year.

I am not sure if we have decided why that happened, or if it just is what it is.

Tate was SO diligent with his tomatoes.

I honestly would have given up!!

He brought in almost ripe tomatoes everyday, sat them on the table, and babied those things until they were ripe.

Bless that boy.

Wait until you see what we got out of all his tomatoes!

First up was salsa.

We used to can salsa on the farm and I have notes about it all.

I have great photos of those days too….don’t let me get on memory lane!!

My last notes about canning salsa on the farm said we made 109 quarts in one growing season.

One. Hundred. And. Nine.

Goodness, we have such ambitious children!!!

Well, we didn’t do that many this year, but I am thrilled with what we accomplished.

We only made one large batch of salsa, because we had PLANS for those tomatoes!

Next up with the tomatoes was ketchup.

We had a good recipe – but let’s just say it is not good enough.

We used arrowroot starch instead of corn starch to thicken it, and it did not work.

So we have runny ketchup.

But it is ok – we learned a lot, and we use that ketchup in recipes all the time – and it is delicious!

Notice my method of counting how many quarts of tomato juice I had added to this pot.

One quart of juice poured into the pot, one fork put in the cup!

My brain is not able to keep track all on its own, you guys!

We also have twelve gallons of whole tomatoes in our freezer right now!

We have plans for those tomatoes too.

Maybe we will get to it over Christmas break!

We hope to make barbeque sauce.

We have a recipe where you freeze the tomatoes, thaw them, squeeze all of the water out of them before you use them, and then continue on with the recipe.

This makes a thick sauce easily!

Hopefully, anyway!

We are excited to try it!!

The last thing that we put up this fall we did not grow ourselves.

Addie found these apples on marketplace for a really cheap price!

We decided to split them and put them up together.

We put up Addie’s apples first.

It did not go perfectly, as most things don’t!

That beautifully curated photo below of the pots full of apples on the stovetop is deceiving.

After I took that photo, we sat down to eat dinner and those apples burnt and had to be thrown away.

I also lost that very good pot on the left there!

We could not get it clean – and we tried all kinds of things – so it had to be thrown away too.

We still managed to get all of Addie’s apples done in one evening!

I think she had twenty some quart containers for the freezer?

My portion of the apples sat in the garage far too long before Blake, Tate and I finally got to them.

I had seen another way to make applesauce and decided to try it instead.

We spent the time upfront washing, coring and chopping the apples, but leaving the skins on.

We also were careful to cut out bad spots.

We cooked our apples in two roasters.

Poor Blake manned those roasters by stirring them constantly like his life depended on it!

Tate helped with all parts of this too!

Once the apples were cooked, we ran the apples in the Vitamix blender to turn it into applesauce.

We poured the applesauce from the blender into the hot jars, and canned them.

The only thing I would do different next time is I would add some water to the blender too, as this applesauce is just a bit too thick.

But it is delicious!!

And SO worth the time it took!

We love applesauce and use it all the time.

Just look at all the quart jars full in that photo below!

Wow, did we really do all that??

It was SO FUN!!!!

I know that when spring is headed our way we will be looking back at these posts to trigger our memories about our gardens this year.

We make decisions going forward based on the way things have went in the past!

I am currently enjoying the holidays, winter activities, the cold and the snow very much.

Chad just said last night at dinner, “I am so glad we live where there are four seasons!”

Me too, Chaddy, me too.

God’s gift to us!!!

Any gardeners out there??

Isn’t it fun??!!

I do hope, though, that you guys are enjoying this winter season of “rest” like we are.

We are still busy, don’t get me wrong.

But it feels more restful than those summer months for sure.

I still cannot wait for our gardens in 2026!!