Anyway, we've been nurturing our garden: weeding, tending, staking tomatoes, keeping the critters out, using Epsom Salts around the plants, etc. We've planted: tomatoes, beans, sugar snap peas, regular peas, potatoes, corn, watermelon, zucchini, cucumbers, cantaloupe, green peppers, jalapeno peppers, banana peppers, broccoli, cabbage, radishes, three different types of lettuce, onions, different types of herbs, sunflowers...I'm sure there is more but it's hard to remember it all. We're hoping to put in some pumpkins soon for Halloween, too! Most of it we started from seed and it has been an amazing experience so far.

We are finally starting to see the fruits of our labor. Just Monday Stef picked 18 cucumbers! 1-8! And there is much more to come. Holy Crapinettly! We have 44 tomato plants that are going wild - some of our green tomatoes are too big for me to wrap one hand around! - and pretty soon, we will be having tomatoes coming out of everywhere. We've gotten alot of peppers, alot of peas (both regular and sugar snap) and several big baskets of green beans.

Yesterday was the first harvest of the corn and altogether, we pulled out about 340 ears of corn! Stef, Jacob, Nathan, Matthew and me all helped pick. I nearly peed in my pants laughing and Nathan and Jacob - they are so funny. Nathan's decided he will not be coming home on the day of the next harvest and he doesn't quite understand why we need "so much friggin' corn!" It was quite fun. We then divided it among the three families, so I walked away with about 110 ears. Matthew has been having as much fun with this as I have. (Last night we formed a band on Rockband and we named ourselves: CornChuckers) While I was at work today, Matt shucked all of it and cleaned it all! What a great guy! Tonight, we blanched it so we could freeze it for the winter and I took pictures of our whole process. The only pictures I didn't get was the HUGE pile of unshucked ears but, as you can plainly see, we had fun and it almost looked like we knew what we were doing. I'm actually quite proud of myself - this is the first project like this I've actually undertaken all on my own. I'm usually over helping Stef so this is a great source of pride for me...

Here's the shucked corn ready to be blanched and frozen!

And the boiling process...9 minutes in boiling water

Then 9 minutes in ice water

Then out to dry

Then bag it up, we did 6 - 8 ears per bag.

I got those baggies and the thing you can use to suck all the air out. It was fun, the kids all took turns sucking air out of the baggies :)

Our amazing pile of 14 bags of corn!

The boys playing Vanna White with the corn.

The freezer before (Yep, it needs to be wiped out)...

The freezer after...