summer harvest time!!!!

I have barely caught my breath after moving, before I can even get the pictures on the walls,  its time to start harvesting our summer garden and fruit trees and start canning, making salsa, storing onions and garlic and alot more.  The cool thing is now we have a real cellar under the house to put all this wholesome goodness and keep it longer(post a pic soon)  I have already put our raw honey, which we harvested last year down there and some of the garlic and onions I have already braided(post a pic soon).  In another week we will be harvesting another year's worth of honey(post a pic soon). I have already been making fresh homemade salsa for the past week( I will add some pics and recipe soon) and enjoying summer sandwiches with fresh tomato and onion.  So today the kids and I picked a bunch of peaches, tomatoes, peppers, plums, blackberries, and cherry tomatoes. Now I am no expert in canning and preserving. I have only done a small amount last year. Before then we just ate what we could durring the summer and the rest went to waste.  I was took sick back then, with my chronic illness, to put in the time with everything else going on. But now that I am the healthiest I have been in 7 years and we have enough to work with it is now worth my time and effort to preserve some of this stuff.  I remember as a child spending summers with my family in Texas helping grandmother Jean can peas and harvest from her garden.  But I think I was only seven or eight and of course i didn't retain any of the process.  So I am a real greenie at this stuff, pun intended!  I have had to just google instructions online and refer to the books that came with our pressure canner.  We purchased our pressure cooker and juicer both from www.lehmans.com Check them out, they are from the ammish country and filled with tons of cool items built and used by the ammish, which means lots of non electric items and items used way back when.  Tommorrow will be a homesteading day, I plan to make some cobbler. I already made some two days ago which was fantastic!!  I will also make some salsa, and can some peaches and maybe even some tomatoes. My favorite summer food from our garden is homemade salsa with our very own tomatoes, garlic, onions, cilantro, lemon juice and salt and of course homemade quacamole(no avacadoes on our trees yet)with chips, yuuuuummmmmmmyyy!! I will add to this post some detailed pictures on the process and recipes so check back with this post for updates! In the mean time here are some pictures:

  

Don 't worry thats not pesticides sitting next to the onions.  We are organic in the garden beds.  thats round up for the weeds around the farm.

I failed to mention earlier that none of this would be possible without my gardener of a husband.  He really enjoys gardening all things edible!  He is the one who really is the brains and muscle behind this whole operation.  I just help harvest a little and prep and cook everything. He is also the one that really pushed to start this whole homesteading idea. I was always fascinated by it but probably enver would have done it on my own.  In the past two years we have been able to make drastic improvements with my major medical illness, Charcot-Marie-Tooth and our son's ADHD and chronic sinusitis and allergies by eating out of our garden!!  We make a good team!  I truly appreciate all his hard work!!