This week in the garden

Our first cucumber!  Oh, and don't mind that ghost in the garden.  She is quite tame.  We have two cucumber plants that Tristan brought home from preschool at the end of the year.  They really were an afterthought.  I didn't have a place to plant them and Matt's mom suggested planting them at the edge of the garden and letting them trail down the side.  That has worked perfectly.  They are happy trailing along the ground and we are happy eating them.

And the squash is plentiful.  Although not from our garden, we were overwhelmed blessed this week with squash from two of our neighbors gardens.  What to do with almost a dozen squash and two kids who don't like it?  Blanch and freeze, that's what!  The kids each took turns washing, even cutting (very supervised) with a sharp knife, I did the blanching, then they gave the squash an ice bath and packed it away in freezer bags.  Abigail worked on her penmanship by marking and dating the bags.  Tristan worked on counting and fine motor skills by counting the bags for each batch and actually getting the cut up slippery squash into the bags.

So far this year we are stocked up on strawberry freezer jam, blueberries, and squash.  It is getting pretty full in there...I think some of the dead animals need to go...

peace