Garden bounty

Julianne really got into gardening this year. She was particularly interested in flowers and herbs.

I bought her a few varieties of basil seed-regular, cinnamon, purple, and lime. My girls love pesto so she was motivated by that to grow lots of basil hoping that she'd get pesto once in a while. I only managed to make it once this summer. I intended to make more, put it on my mental to-do list several times, but it never seemed to happen.

Then Friday came. We heard there was a frost/freeze warning for Friday night. Funny, isn't it, how I was able to fit in something I had managed to put off so many times before? I had her go harvest her basil. I told her to cut the main stem and bring 'em in.

That girl grew a ton of basil.

She didn't cut much of the lime, purple, or cinnamon basil, mostly just the regular. She stood the plants in baskets and had two half-bushel baskets full.



These are the first five jars of pesto I made Friday night before running out of Parmesan. After the quiz, we stopped and bought more so we could finish. Clarence and Julianne had placed the basil in buckets of water in the basement to hold it until we could continue. It worked perfectly. Altogether, we got about 19 or 20 half-pint jars of pesto. We vacuum sealed them as we went and popped them into the freezer.

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Then there is this. Looks appetizing, yes? I know, I know, they aren't pretty like that.

We grew golden beets this year. I decided to try them in the crockpot for Sunday lunch. I was already making Stephanie's crock pot pesto fish recipe. [As a side note-you must make this recipe. She is so right about fish in the CP. It works SO well, I find it hard to believe.] I thought it'd be great to have the beets ready for lunch, too. Not my original idea, though. Clarence had tried it before and told me it worked. Thankfully, it worked in the same amount of time the fish needed.

I fished them out with tongs, cut the ends off, let them cool for a minute or two, and slipped the skin off. I scraped the skin off a few of them but mostly didn't have to do much scraping.

We love beets here. We will definitely be doing this again.

Look at that golden yumminess. Aren't they pretty?

Our friends, adoptive grandparents to the girls, surprised us with some fresh lima beans at church, too. We tried growing them this year but didn't do well with them. None of us had ever eaten them fresh before but the girls just love the dried ones in things. We steamed them when we got home and enjoyed their garden bounty along with our own.

I just re-read this post and thought I should clarify. The fish isn't hidden under those beets. I used one crockpot for the fish, one for the beets.

Oh, and it never did frost here Friday night.