It’s that time of year–time to watch things grow! Winters linger where I live. I wait until the end of May or early June to plant flowers, and I’ve been planting herbs in pots on our deck for several years, too.
We used to have a garden. I’m lazy about keeping up with it after the first month, so we decided to let it go. Since we’re blessed with numerous local farmstands and U-pick farms nearby, I don’t miss my garden much. When I do, I browse online sites like Fine Gardening and soak in the pretty flowers of A Wyoming Garden to get my fix!
Next week I plan on spending a few hours in the strawberry patch a few miles away. My goal? Bring home a flat of bright red berries. I make lower-sugar freezer jam each year with pectin specifically made for low or no-sugar recipes. You can find the Sure-Jell brand at Walmart or other grocery stores. I also make blueberry jam. It’s delicious!
Last year I bought a few dozen ears of corn. Blanching them didn’t take long. Quart-sized freezer bags stack nicely in our chest freezer. I wished I’d frozen more. This year I will.
Canning or freezing produce doesn’t require a huge time commitment if I focus on one thing at a time. And it certainly makes my family happy in November when we’re still enjoying peak flavor from the food I’ve preserved.
Other country pursuits I enjoy (even though I’m in the suburbs!) during the summer:
- Filling a glass pitcher with water and letting tea bags steep in it all day on my deck for sun tea
- The farmers market! Local honey has so much flavor.
- Sitting out back, watching the birds fly from tree to tree and the clouds drift through the sky
- Baking summer treats, like peach cobbler or blueberry breakfast cake (recipe is linked)
- Walking around ponds at rural parks
- Reading a book on our back deck
I could go on and on. Each season brings its own joys!
I’d love to hear your thoughts on gardening, canning, and other country pursuits. What do you enjoy about the summer?
Jill Kemerer is a Publishers Weekly bestselling author of heartwarming, emotional, small-town romance novels often featuring cowboys. Her essentials include coffee, caramels, a stack of books and long walks outdoors in Ohio where she resides with her husband.
I don’t enjoy any of that but I love my house plants!
I just laughed out loud! I’m glad you love your house plants–I love ours, too!
I put out a few tomato plants and one cucumber every year and that is about the only gardening that I do. I am not able to take care of much more.
You garden more than I do–I’m impressed!
My parents weren’t gardeners, so I never really experienced it much. I’ve always thought I’d enjoy a garden – although I fear I might be a bit of a lazy gardener 😉 – but health issues have kept me from being able to really try my hand at it. When our son & daughter were younger & still living at home, they & my husband planted & tended a tiny little raised-bed garden in our little back yard in town for a couple of years. It was amazing how much better those veggies tasted when you knew they’d come from your own back yard!!! 🙂
I’m sorry you have health issues. I think it’s great that your husband had a raised-bed garden. I agree–the veggies taste so much better!
I tried canning and it was a failure, because I was afraid to eat it It is OK as I am allergic to most fruits.
Haha! I hear you. It’s a little scary trusting that home canning actually worked! What a bummer about the fruits. 🙁
Hey Jill! My favorite topic! My flowers and gardening! I grew up with 2 brothers on a farm in north Florida. We pick veggies and put them up! What wonderful memories sitting in our webbed chairs under the shaded pecan tree out front while Mom and Dad blanched while my brothers and I chucked the corn!
Now my husband and I live a further south and we enjoy our potted vegetables. Just cucumbers, banana peppers, bell peppers and tomatoes. We planned to do a raised bed next year. We enjoy our rock bed with potted flowers off our cooking shed and back screen porch and patio. Most evenings you will find us listening to classic rock and watering our plants!
I enjoy evenings playing putt golf with my grandson, reading, cook outs, outside games, and family!
Yay! Your favorite topic! I loved reading about your memories in Florida. You sure manage a good crop out of pots. I can only imagine what you’ll do with a raised bed!
Right now I still enjoy the gardening (though I really need garden beds that are raised now) I enjoy canning and drying and freezing. though to be honest I am starting to feel like taking a back seat now. sigh quilting dash lady at comcast dot net
The raised beds are better for your back, for sure. I’m sorry you feel like taking a back seat. For everything a season. Hugs
I used to get produce from my dad’s farmette in Tennessee and can tomato sauce, freeze corn, and a few other things. I also have honey from his apiary.
He’s 85 and has given up most of it, so I don’t get the bounty for free now. And, I have too much shade in my small yard for a garden.
I make iced tea year-round, but not sun tea.
I already had quilts, but I just bought home a huge stack from my late mother-in-law’s apartment. And a blanket chest. Some of the quilts were passed down through family and date back nearly 100 years.
**brought home
That’s a bummer about your dad. I’m happy you were able to use so much from his farm! That’s amazing about the quilts being passed down. What a treasure!
I grew up on our family farm and my mom and dad put in a big garden. I didn’t mind helping with the freezing of the vegetables but I hated working in the garden. My hubby loves to garden but for the last several years we haven’t put one in.
Aww, I get it–I didn’t mind helping with our garden, but I wasn’t allowed to help with freezing and canning when I was little. So our positions are reversed!
I don’t really enjoy summer. It’s HOT in FL! I do love the fruits of summer, though, and I’ve got blueberries in my freezer that I bought at peak. I’m going to be checking out that recipe you shared!
I don’t blame you! I’m sure the heat gets old after a while. That’s great about your blueberries! I’ve used frozen blueberries in the recipe, and they worked just fine!
Living in Wyoming the growing season is short. I have a huge garden – potato’s onions, tomato’s, squash (winter and summer), pumpkins, cabbage, peppers, corn and much more. Quit canning years ago, what I keep, I freeze. Majority is given away to family and friends.
Ooh, Wyoming! Wow, you do grow an assortment. My mouth is watering! I find produce easy to freeze, and we have a chest freezer–plenty of room!
I love my flowerpots. If I could keep plants I put in the ground alive, that would be what I do, but I do not have a green thumb. After spending a bit on an orange Azalea bush, it just did not take off in my yard, even with a starter fertilizer. It probably didn’t help when I moved it from a very sunny spot with intense heat in the heat of the day, to a spot with shade for about half the day. It just withered and died. The same with rhododendron. I planted them in the back yard where it was very shady and next to lots of trees, just like where it grows in the mountains. Again, they died on me. I give up here as our soil must be very poor.
I think some plants just don’t make it for whatever reason. We have a lot of clay in our yard, and not everything we plant survives!
We had a small vegetable garden when we lived in a home where the soil had been amended for years. Now we live in one that has “high desert” soil (Mojave, CA – picture the background in cowboy movies which just might be the nearby Alabama Hills). If we can inspire ourselves, constructing raised beds is the way to go. Maybe next year…
I’m picturing Mojave! I’m guessing “High Desert” soil isn’t great for growing veggies. 🙁
I have canned and frozen garden produce since helping my mother in the garden and in the kitchen since I was seven or eight. Not always willingly pulling weeds but the joy of the results is still with me. For many years I have volunteered as a Food Safety and Preservation Assistant for our county Cooperative Extension Service. My husband sold produce from a HUGE garden even selling to local owned grocery stores in the 1960’s to earn money for his college fund. He still plans more garden than I would choose to have 🙂 He does help me with it. Today I need to pick my asparagus before it gets too big.
Hello Jill, As I am not able to participate in our vegetable garden My Youngest Daughter makes sure to raise the garden now days because of my health! She has a green thumb that’s for sure So we have our fresh produce to can when it comes on Green beans, Sweet Potatoes, Tomatoes, and Salsa and Corn all the vegetables I help her with the canning and my middle daughter visits and helps We spend family time at doing what we love to do! Have a Blessed Week!
Oh my goodness you make sun tea too?! I never heard of anyone else making it except my deep-south Texas family! I love sun tea. It has such a delicate flavor. I love drinking it immediately after it’s been sitting outside, and it’s still warm from the sun…
I also love blueberry picking in the summer! We have a favorite farm in southeast Texas. I think we’re going this weekend!
I like eating watermelon in the summer. One year we spit the seeds off our deck, and the next year we had a huge crop of volunteer watermelons. Seedless! And some of them were the yellow kind! It was great. We’ve never been able to grow them since, no matter how hard we tried.
I only do outside flowers now. I used to grow tomatoes, but didn’t do that this year. Twice I grew gardens and made homemade ketchup, pickles, and relish.
We have had a vegetable garden at almost every house we have lived. When we moved here 32 years ago, Cleaning up an area for a veggie garden was one of the first things we did. We love asparagus and that bed is now about 20 ft by 30 ft. It is wonderful. We also put in a bunch of flower beds in areas that lent themselves to them. This is the first year it has gotten away from us. I have only one bed of 6 (all large) weeded and planted. I weeded two others then went out of town. We got back and they were both grown over again. Warm weather came early and we have had lots of rain. It has been hard finding the time to work in them. My husband is having the same issue in the vegetable garden. Our late 70’s bodies can’t handle as much as those 40 year old bodies did. Plus, after 32 years in the house, all the painting, etc needs to be redone. There hasn’t been any time for relaxing afternoons on the porch reading.
I am managing to make the sun tea. We do take breaks or eat out on the porch where there is a wonderful breeze. About the only time I get to read is when I am waiting in a doctor’s office. I am trying hard to get stuff done so I can take the time to read or we can go for a hike without feeling we really should be working.
We do enjoy the fresh vegetables from the garden. We have a great farmers’ market and there are several farm stands nearby, plus a few pick your own farms. I used to can vegetables, make jams, catsups, and mustards, and even did sauerkraut and wine. No time for that anymore. I do freeze vegetables and tomato sauce. I do enjoy making fruit pies all summer. It is strawberry rhubarb pie time now and I’ve already made 3.