Saturday, October 2, 2010

summer things

Random...

I'm having troubles loading pictures and then putting text with it, so here area just some random pictures from the summer.

We spent some time in Montana, Idaho and Washington this summer and really enjoyed it. This is the Riverfront Park in Spokane. It was fun to be there, but most fun was being with Jenn's family at Sandpoint, so fun there was no real time for pictures- just swimming, eating, relaxing, FroggerRama.



My square=foot garden did pretty well. I learned alot in my first try- like how important it is to thin out the seedlings so the remaining sprouts can actually get bigger. But I was able to bottle 2 jars of pickled beets, made a couple of batches of "Zucchini Milk" for making Zucchini BRead. There are still carrots and parsnips out there. We had a pretty poor growing season this year, with a really wet, cold summer. We are having Indian Summer now- 26C today!


We bottled some BC peaches in August, and then got some delicious Utah peaches in September, so I made 3 or 4 batches of peach jam. The full sugar variety turned out the best, but I did make a freeze batch of no sugar, and one that was half sugar half splenda. It doesn't keep it's beautiful color with the Splenda. But I borrowed from Hilary's recipe and put a little cinnamon and nutmeg in each batch. It just adds another layer of flavor and is soooo good!



We also got some little tiny, but tasty Concorde grapes on our grapevine for the first time ever! Fun to see them grown. They have seeds in them but are not too bad for our climate.