The Bountiful Blessings of a Garden

This is a red tomato. Not that stuff at the store.

I have learned that store-bought produce is nothing compared to home-grown vegetables. We have had a garden since the beginning of our farm, and it has gifted us with so tons of fresh produce. One of the differences I have noticed between store-bought produce and fresh home-grown produce: the tomatoes are pink at the store. At my house, if we pick a pink tomato, it's going straight to the windowsill. We wait for that beautiful red hue then we slice 'em and eat 'em on sandwiches, with cheese (sometimes our delicious homemade cheese made from our cow's milk), and occasionally we bake them with mozzarella cheese and fresh basil from our garden.
      And we don't only grow tomatoes. We plant bell peppers, green beans, purple hull beans, okra, corn, cucumber, eggplant, jalapenos peppers, habanero chilies, squash, butternut squash, basil, and we sometimes plant cantaloupe and watermelon. We harvest every year in the summer, and good gosh, do we get a lot of the "fruits of our labor."

       I really enjoy planting our garden on a warm spring's day. Mom and I do it together, as we do with most things. Mom and I are very much alike in most things, that's why we get along so well. It takes a couple hours to plant that amount of seeds, but since we have mild spring weather where we call home, I don't mind. On the other hand, harvesting isn't the funnest activity. We try to harvest in the morning or in the evening, because unlike our springs, our summers are hot and (worst of all) humid. Now if you send me outside to pick tomatoes or bell peppers, I probably won't give a fuss. If you send me out to pick green beans, then that'a another story. Let's see if I can find the right words to express my relationship with picking green beans. I abhor, hate, and perfectly well despise picking green beans.
       After we harvest some veggies, we can them. Canning is a preservation technique used by most people in my area. Of course, the area in which we live farmers are everywhere.  As Dad would say ," You can't sling a dead cat without hitting one of them." Yes, my dad says many strange things. Anyway, we basically lived off canned green beans last year. Hey, I said I didn't like picking them, not eating them.

Quart jars of veggies we canned this year

      One of the greatest feelings in the world is the feeling you get when you open a quart jar of veggies, knowing that you planted the very plant the vegetable came from, and you harvested it with your very own hands. It's wonderful, I tell ya.