My family enjoyed making pickles in July, which just happened to be National Pickle Month. Although we didn’t have enough cucumbers in our garden to make all of our pickles, I do enjoy being able to use our own fresh produce when possible. In fact, Pickles, Pickles, I Like Pickles began the day I was in my former garden picking cucumbers to make pickles.
We had a large garden at our previous house, which I loved. It was nice having a wide variety of produce in our garden and multiple fruit trees in our yard. Now that we are at a different location, our garden consists of a variety of plants we are growing in pots on our deck and patio.
It is definitely different (and takes less time) than what we had before, so it has been a little bit of a learning process. I am glad we have still been able to enjoy some of our own fresh produce.
We use to have sixteen jalapeno plants, so we pickled a lot of jalapenos and made/froze a lot of jalapeno poppers. Now, we have four jalapeno plants. I am glad we have still been able to enjoy quite a few jalapeno poppers, and we have been able to pickle two quarts of jalapenos (so far).
We’ve canned salsa in the past, but since we don’t have as many plants anymore, I was really excited when we had enough peppers and tomatoes to make some fresh salsa. One of my daughters and I ended up making two varieties of salsa.
We picked some tomatoes, a jalapeno, and a green pepper.
We rinsed them off, diced the tomatoes, and cut and deseeded the peppers.
In our first batch, we mixed diced tomatoes, cut jalapenos, a splash of vinegar, and some salt. Our second batch was less spicy and included diced tomatoes, diced green peppers, diced onions, a splash of vinegar, and some salt.
The salsa was really simple to make and tasty to eat with some tortilla chips.
Do you have a garden to enjoy some fresh produce?
Check these out for more garden produce fun.
Brigitte Brulz 