It’s year three of My Growing Boys, and the boys know what to do. When I casually asked them what they wanted to grow this season, Rex told me to get the garden grid printed out so he could fill it out. Okay, so right to business.

I used my usual Square Foot Garden websites to help them select their veggies, and we filled the grids out in between them playing rounds of Fortnite in the basement. Whatever works.

There were not really any surprises selected. Jude had a strong preference to “grow yellow tomatoes like last year,” Rex wanted his garden to “look clean,” and Morris wanted to try a squash along with lots of carrots. Otherwise, lots of basics: tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, peas, chives.

Jude has always wanted to have a fairy garden, so we’re setting aside part of my garden for that little community. The other half I’ve reserved for herbs and tomatoes. And Ty told me just to pick the plants for his garden – no preference – but I know it’s therapy for him to harvest and snack at the same time at the end of a busy day, so I picked green beans and smaller tomatoes for his garden because they have a high yield.

Soon, it will be time to plant!

Notice Rex’s instructions.

Loves his yellow tomatoes!

Writing, not pics this year!

This is one of my favorite posts to write: reflections from my boys.

JUDE, AGE 8

1.What were your favorite vegetables to grow? My favorite things were my kohlrabi – just the taste of it. Also, sungold tomatoes, since I just had one, so good! Cucumbers were possibly my favorite things to have because they grow a lot of things. Look at a cucumber one day. Go on a vacation for a week and it’s about a foot long.

2.What do you want to do next year? Next time I’ll do corn again. Corn grows huge. From a small seed to one of the biggest veggies. Maybe sunflowers, too.

REX, AGE 10

1.What were your favorites? I haven’t picked my chillis yet…Basil, and cucumbers and chives grew well. Onions didn’t cuz Jude ripped them out. Baseball kept me busy, so I wasn’t as into my garden this year.

2.Next year? Same.

MORRIS, AGE 5

1.What were your favorites? Getting peppers and growing carrots and green beans. I like picking the peppers cuz I knew what would be. I liked carrots cuz when you pull them out you see what’s growing.

2.Next year? I want to grow onions cuz they’re fun to get out of the ground.

The tomatoes keep ripening. An explosion of red and gold color the garden. Jude has taken to gobbling up his sun-golds.

The kale keeps coming. I harvest so many leaves, I’m not sure what to do with all of them. I give some to niece Jojo, who loves kale. I freeze some for winter soups. And, I chop some for Friday night pizza.

Morris’s banana peppers keep on coming. He loves that he gets to pick one every time he visits his garden.

There’s still cauliflower to pick, some broccoli sprouts I can cut, and green beans lingering…

Last season I thought about succession planting; I loved the idea of extending the growing season. However, I have so many vegetables still coming, I’m calling it good.

…although Rex did a lot of growing in the spring, before we planted. I knew he was going through a spurt then because he was napping a lot after school, something uncharacteristic of my Rex. So, no inches added to his height of 59.5 inches (although Ty told me my early summer calculations might have been inaccurate). 🙂

Jude grew a half inch taller this summer (now 60 inches), as did Morris (now 46 inches). But Morris’s shoe size expanded by an inch and a half! I could hardly believe it when he showed me that his new tennis shoes from the end of the school year didn’t fit anymore.

Morris is proud of his pepper plant! There are several peppers to pluck every few days, and on this particular day, there was a small load. Morris was proud!

My sister-in-law inspired me to make salsa using fresh ingredients and a food processor, instead of canning. 🙂 There’s no measuring, just dumping, tasting, and adding more of this or that. This is my kind of salsa!

Tomatoes

Onion

Cilantro

Lime Juice

Green pepper (optional)

Hot pepper (optional)

Salt (optional)

Morris loves to push the button on my food processor, so I let him go for it.

I must say, my salsa was the best I’ve tasted! And I think the “Easy-Going” addition to the name is perfect as it easily disappeared, or went away in two nights…because I ate it all.

Today I picked nine cucumbers! I collected the hugful from Rex’s, Jude’s, and Daddy’s garden. WOW! With that many cucumbers, I decided to make Refrigerator Pickles like I did last year.

The recipe is quite simple…but it took a while to convince myself to do it. Canning is no quick job, even canning that doesn’t do the final, boiling step, like this recipe. But I can’t let them go to waste!

Whenever I can, I am reminded of my Great-grandma Candy who lived in a small house on the acreage where I grew up. On hot summer days, I could always find her in a long sleeve blouse, pants, and a head scarf, raking or weeding her garden, which must have been a fourth of an acre. She loved to spend time in her garden, and she loved to can cucumbers. She always made spicy dill pickles, and my brother and I would challenge each other at suppertime to see if we could eat a whole one. Grandma Candy loved to can, no matter how hot it was outside or how hot her little house became on the inside when she got busy with this task. She loved to share her canned goods, and she also stored many of them in an old-fashioned, underground cellar.

So finally, this weekend, I followed the Ball Canning book and boiled:

1 cup of vinegar

3 cups of water

1 tbsp of pickling spice

2 cloves of garlic

3 sprigs of dill (dried from our garden)

Then, I had Jude pack the jars with cucumbers I sliced. He helped me last year but only wanted to do one jar this year. I’ll take what help I can get.

After the brine came to a boil, I poured it into the cucumber-filled jars and screwed on the lid. With traditional canning, the final step would be to boil the jars with the cucumbers and brine for 10-15 minutes and wait to hear the seal pop. This is the speedy version, however I did hear the seal pop simply from the hot brine inside.

We made of batch of six jars with plenty of brine left-over. So, I used my cucumber scraps and the two remaining cucumbers and made a batch to eat right away. These jars are supposed to be stored in the fridge for one month before eating, and they’ll stay good for up to three months.

There are some pretty things growing in our gardens… The cauliflower is purple and white. The tomatoes are red, orange, yellow, and green. The chili peppers are yellow and red, and they point up in a friendly way. There are little, purple buds on the green bean plants, and the slow eggplant finally has some lovely blossoms. The cucumbers are a soft green and white, scattered here and there. It is beautiful to see a living garden.

But our garden isn’t perfect, either. Those seeds we planted at the beginning of the season didn’t quite work out. The hollyhocks never grew, which is a bummer because they’re from my grandma. I think we’ll try again next summer. The squash and pumpkin plants grew initially, but then I didn’t plant them because I couldn’t find the right place, and it was too late. We did plant one squash in Morris’s garden, but the single fruit fell off the vine and never matured. We’ll try again next year. Our green bean plants have not been as productive; last season they bloomed and we picked over and over. And, the eggplants still don’t have any fruit, which Jude’s did last season by July.

And, there’s more. The Japanese beetles ate holes in our cucumber leaves. Squash bugs attacked some cucumbers, and those nasty tomato hornworms really attacked Rex’s tomato plant, and therefore, reduced his crop.

Plus, we’ve weeded much less this season, so random weeds have found a home in our garden beds…

We know there’s no such thing as a perfect garden because the gardeners aren’t perfect either. But who needs perfection? The pests and weeds and unpredictability make it interesting!

Jude’s potato plant looked dead: brown and wilted. Earlier in the summer, it grew full and green and had white blossoms at the top. This was exciting and new as the potato he planted last season never even grew a stem… And he was so hopeful.

Therefore, he was not sure about planting a potato this season. He didn’t dedicate much space – only one square foot – because he didn’t want to waste the room on a plant that didn’t produce.

So, he buried one and surprise! – eventually a little plant grew from the earth. Then that plant got bigger and bigger and almost too big for it’s square foot. But this was new and encouraging.

Toward the beginning of August, the plant started to wilt, and it was time for Jude to dig, to see if any potatoes had grown underneath. He pulled the stems out first, then started to dig with his hands…

And he was thrilled! Jude found three, little white potatoes, barely bite-sized, but still potatoes! Success! Jude grew potatoes!

Morris is our new garden photographer! He swipes my phone and says he wants to take the pictures this time…

He arranged our most recent picks on the table in our living room. What a great job!