Paige’s Produce

I know that we’re past the gardening season now, but we can still talk about it, right?

In the spring, Ryan and Cole built me some garden boxes. Ryan had been reading up on the square foot gardening, and made me two 4 x 4 boxes.

He filled it with the special mix of soil and compost and something else, and then I made a grid out of bamboo, and got started planting.

I had to weight down the grid with rocks so that the bamboo wouldn’t blow away. See those cute little tomato and pepper plants? Well, those ones froze that weekend, and I had to get new ones a few days later. What is it they say about planting before Mother’s day?

A month or so later, my little garden was really starting to sprout up.

I even asked Ryan to make one more box because I had more things I wanted to plant.

Mid summer the boxes looked more like this.

I realized that things need to be planted farther apart and to put all the squash and wandering plants on the outside.

In the summer, I decided I had to actually DO something with the food we were growing, so I canned tomato juice (which I thought I had a picture of, but I guess I don’t). I thought I was all bad because I canned 24 quarts of tomato juice FROM MY OWN TOMATOES, mind you, until I was talking to my father-in-law, and he said, “Let’s see, how many quarts of tomato juice have we canned this year? Oh, yes, 65 so far.” But then when I asked him how many plants he had, I think it was something like 30 plants. I only had 8. I guess they really like their tomato juice.

I also bottled peaches, and I did it all by myself!

I only got 13 quarts, but they were yummy, and we grew the peaches ourselves, and I was quite proud of them.

Then we were given some apples and pears, so I made pear jam, and then decided to make apple pear sauce with the rest of the pears.


While yummy, applesauce is not really the quickest thing. It takes hours and hours to do a dozen quarts! But I was proud of myself for being so Mormon that I can actually use my steam canner and preserve some of our own produce.

Just this week I got another box of apples, so I spent the day on Tuesday making applesauce AGAIN. This time the kids were home, but they were sick, so they were no help. I think it took me about 5 hours to get those 12 quarts done, but they ARE done.

So, as the growing season comes to a close, I’m thankful for the blessing of being able to grow a garden. I have a lot of ideas for how to do things NEXT year, and I can hardly wait until it’s spring and time to dig in the dirt again.