Garden goods

Despite the craziness of having a baby in the middle of the summer, we managed to have a great year garden-wise.  Understandably, my involvement in the actual gardening, and in putting up the food, was even more limited than usual.  I just sat on my butt all day cared for a very demanding baby and enjoyed eating the garden’s bounty.  We canned some green beans, and my mother-in-law canned tons of tomatoes and froze lots of other veggies for us.

Last week, we made one of our favorite soups, Country Vegetable Soup with Pasta, almost entirely with garden goods, including fresh tomatoes in mid-December (picked green before the frost in early November, and ripened slowly inside since then).

Homegrown goods in our soup included leeks, tomatoes (fresh, not canned), onion, celery, sweet potatoes (subbed for carrots in the recipe, because that’s what we had), green beans (from frozen), and basil (also frozen) for the pesto.  We didn’t have any zucchini, so we just subbed more of the other veggies. Hearty and delicious, and so fun to have grown almost all of the ingredients!

In the end, the only non-garden item in the soup, other than the pasta, was the garlic.  We had a nice garlic harvest, but at the rate we go through garlic, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to grow enough (though Matthew’s working on it 🙂 ).