Starting a garden Post #23

Welcome to my Starting a garden blog Post #23 🌻🙂. I decided to change it up this week and lead with a picture of Blueberry the until oh so recently Monarch caterpillar 🐛. Blueberry emerged from its chrysalis this morning and was set free after an hour or so of drying its wings 🦋. Those of you that follow me may realize this is the second Monarch butterfly we have released. We have some great caterpillar habitat (milkweed) and butterfly habitat (Joe Pye Weed). We brought in a caterpillar to protect it from predators and watch it grow. Now we have four more and another in a chrysalis. Everytime we bring in more milkweed to feed our caterpillar - more caterpillars show up in the butterfly house 😆

Since I'm not doing flowers this week, here is another critter from the garden. This smooth green snake was found at sunset. They eat crickets among other things and there are lots of crickets right now.

Now on to the garden...

Here's the harvest from August 21st.

And more from August 26th. Lots of tomatoes right now plus basil, zuchinnis, cucumbers and a few peppers. We actually harvested more than twice this week but we had a house guest and were a little lax on photos 😊

I just tried our first jalapeno pepper. It is quite hot 🔥 Looking forward to making some hot sauce as they come ripe. Recipes welcome 🙂

We are using tomatoes every way we can think of... this pizza is home grown tomatoes, peppers, basil, and Vermont cheese on a home made crust. My favorite is probably still a Caprese salad. We also started making tomato soup.

I missed getting a picture of the soup, here is the last of it doubling as pasta sauce 🙄

Getting ready for another batch, I'll keep you updated.

Most of the cucumbers went into pickle making. We made both bread and butter pickles and some dills.

Here's the pickle scorecard lol. We also used some cucumbers fresh on salads or with dip and made a simple tomato, cucumber and onion salad.

We like grilled zuchinni. Eating some warm and chilling some to use on salads. Plus we have made some crock pot zuchinni dishes with rice and beans or with other grains.

Thanks for joining me in my garden this week 🙏 Have a great week!
P.S. I asked for hot sauce recipes. I'm also interested in any other creative uses of tomatoes 😅

Bonus pics:

Sittin' in the mornin' sun

I'll be sittin' when the evenin' comes

Signing off from lovely Lake Dunmore. Enjoy summer while it lasts!