Preserving - and Eating - our Farm-grown food

We've been preserving lots of food lately, and I am starting to feel rather squirrel-like as I pack the pantry and freezer with our farm-grown food. In the last week we've canned cucumber's into dill pickles (they had been fermenting on the counter for 3 weeks beforehand), canned apple butter with the first of our apples, canned a second batch of crushed tomatoes, dried apples and tomatoes, and sliced and froze another 8 or 9 lbs of peaches (from a friend's yard, not our's). There is another round of cucumber's ready to be pickled, and in another few day's I should have enough tomatoes to either do a batch of salsa or a batch of ketchup. Since I don't need much ketchup for the year, maybe I can do a small batch of each. We also have an incredible amount of apple's that are about to ripen - of around 100 trees throughout our property, a high percentage of them are loaded with apples. We'll be pressing lots into juice and experimenting with apple syrup and hard cider.

We harvested one of our Moons and Stars watermelon's yesterday, and took it to a birthday party. It's our largest watermelon of the season, weighing in at 20 lb! We've got a thing or two to learn about how to tell when a watermelon (or melon in general) is ripe. We thought that if you knocked on it and it sounds hollow then it's ready, but it turns out that “hollowness” is a pretty subjective sound. We picked this melon and found that it was just a pale pink inside. A little bit of googling determined that these types of watermelon can grow to be 40 lbs and should be darker pink/red inside. It didn't taste terrible - but it wasn't great either - but it was such a disappointment to feel like such a large melon went to waste because it was picked too early. We'll chalk it up to experience and allow the remaining two watermelon's to stay on the vine a little longer.

Admiring our 20 lb watermelon.

I'm also pretty excited that we recently harvested our first (of two) cauliflower's. We planted 10 or 15, of which 5 or 6 plants actually grew, resulting in only two vegetables to actually eat. Not a great return, but it makes those veggies very valuable! We ate it very simply - lightly steamed the first head and ate it with seasoned salt and butter. Delicious! We'll eat the second head soon, but it's a little smaller so we wanted to give it another week or so to grow.