We've got CUCUMBERS!!! Time to PICKLE!!!!

Caroline's version of pickling...just stuff the cucumbers in the jar!

What she was doing was intriguing her brothers

It's starting to look like we've got pickles! Yum!!!!

Here are our cucumbers cut into spears

Thankfully Joshua was able to entertain himself with the kitchen gadgets while I made pickles

He rather enjoyed himself
(it was a rare treat that I allowed him to be in this drawer, but sometimes its just worth it!)

Time to fill the jars- they smelled yum!

HOMEMADE Dill pickles!

And we have pickles! Good for up to 3 months...if they last that long :)
BTW- we've since eaten 2 of the 3 jars

Some of the veggies we've been picking

Some of the Gigantic cucumbers

Grandma told me about ripening tomatoes in a sunny window- its working!
(I've been picking them a bit early so I beat the bugs)

The Garden Is Growing Like Crazy

Caroline, Caleb, & Mom showing a HUGE cucumber...its practically too big to use for making pickles, which is what we are really wanting to do, we're learning.

You can't really tell from this pic, but these cucumbers are out of control...we've got 4 mounds of them and so far we've harvested 18 cucumbers!

Dad realized today that we desperately need to thin out all the carrots! We've been overlooking this task until now- there's just been so much to do

This process took awhile...but good thing Dad has helpers

Got Carrots???

We had a ton of carrot thinnings (baby carrots) so we all had large servings of them for dinner tonight...Caroline seemed to especially enjoy them! We're thrilled for our kids and the experience they are getting through gardening. It helps them be more open to eating their veggies and that's a huge plus!!!

Our first giant sunflower head opened this past week! They are taller than we are!

Some progress pictures

The corn is doing awesome
Now we just have to work on keeping the animals away- we've heard raccoons enjoy corn

Its almost time to start getting garden fresh green beans! Yum!

3 large mounds of pickling cucumbers

Grapes are growing in the common area- can't wait to taste them! Joshua has already been after some samples.

Little Garden Girl

Caroline looking pretty dirty at the garden tonight!

We participated in a "weeding party" at the garden to get the common areas more under control. Tonight we primarily weeded in the kids' garden. We earned work-share hours and we got extra tonight since Grandma came along to help!

A fun trip to the garden...

Just an update, our garden is doing extremely well!
Caleb has been keeping an eye on our pepper plants and he'd been wanting to pick a green pepper- the pepper had already grown quite large, especially in comparison to how small the actual pepper plant was. So we told him HE could pick it when we brought our friends from out of town to the garden...tonight was the night!

Even though he doesn't look thrilled in this pic, he was really excited! Our first garden pepper! Its smells so good~

Tonight our friends from ND are passing through and so we brought them out to show them our garden.
We remembered that they were the family we did our 1st garden with in ND 2 summers ago!
Here are all the kids- Caleb, Caroline, Ingrid, Joshua, & Ilsa!