The Garden

This is the time of year when I say I’m not having a garden next year. Many of you have reminded me that I said when we moved back to MO, I was not going to have a garden. We found this house in July, closed the first week in August so . . that was the time of year when I say I’m not having a garden but I know that by January, I’ll be chomping at the bit to get seeds started.

We ordered some heavy duty, commercial grade weed cloth and we’re going to plan out our garden, get all that weed cloth down way before spring (I hope) and then be ready to plant as early as possible and maybe get the garden finished before the dreadful heat of late July/early August arrives.

Probably every year I will say I’m not having a garden, and every year I will have a garden.

You may remember the big planters my neighbor gave me.

My onions have been drying for a few weeks so yesterday I took them out, placed a cutting board on that board on top of one of the planters, trimmed up the onions and put the trimmings into the planters, where are being used as compost bins for now.

Once the onions were trimmed, I weighed them and had 19 pounds of pretty red onions. I kept out some of them to use over the next few weeks, divided the others up, chopped them all. I was probably chopping 13 or 14 pounds of onions, and yes, there were tears. I used about 7 pounds to make onion jam and have the rest of the onions in the freeze dryer.

I had the recipe printed and when I looked at it, I thought it said Japanese Maple Onion Jam. I thought . . why did I print this recipe? I don’t have a Japanese Maple tree? Then I started looking for another recipe to use because I don’t even know anyone who has a Japanese Maple tree. As I was looking at other recipes, I realized the recipe I have printed actually says Jalapeno Maple Onion Jam. OK . . I have jalapeno peppers and don’t need a Japanese Maple tree!

Sorry for the jumbled mess on the counter. This is the garage so who knows what’s in the boxes back there but on the counter, there are jars of potatoes, breakfast sausage, and several jars of pickled peppers.

I ended up with 7 half pints of onion jam. I almost held out a bit and didn’t can it because I wanted it for today. We’re having smoked ribs, baked beans, and potato salad for our meal today. I was thinking of heating up some brie and serving it with the onion jam and crackers for an appetizer. I decided not to hold out any of the jam and figured if a jar didn’t seal, I could use that. I must have jinxed it because I had one jar that didn’t seal so that’s what we’ll have with our brie this evening.