The best way to preserve the flavors of summer ...

It was a wee bit sad walking into a grocery store to buy fruits and vegetables today. I didn't even really notice it, but our little garden had thoroughly spoilt us this year. We've not spent much money on fresh vegetables since early June! We've been getting most of what we needed fresh and organically from our garden and supplementing the rest with goodies from the local farmers' market.

We knew this day would come so we were, for the first time, diligent about storing, freezing, dehydrating, preserving, and pickling our garden produce. We learned how to can from Zach's mom and read up/ experimented with the things we didn't know. We worked long and hard, often late into the night.

And for our efforts, we yielded a good supply of tomato sauce,

some peach jam,

some raspberry jam,

and blueberry jam.

We froze a lot of our peppers, but we also tried to can some of them ...

We also pickled a fancy schmancy range of vegetables ...

I'd like to think we're done with storing and preserving for the rest of the year, but if we are fortunate enough to get another round of beets, radishes, and carrots, I know Zach would want to can those too!