The garden has been planted, and now we wait for the first fruits of our labor.

Spinach, lettuce, peas, squash, cucumber, pumpkin, sweet onions, red onions, tomatoes, and lots more. This is going to be a delicious year.

We had the greatest surprise today.

My brother-in-law showed up with his tiller and helped us till out 10×20ft garden. Then he stuck around a few more hours and tilled another 20×40ft garden for us too. We are going to have ONE HECK of a garden this year.

As trade for his hard work, I sent him home with some blueberry jam, muscadine jelly, apple butter, crabapple jelly, and one jar of my prized (and worth more than gold) wild blackberry jam.

On Monday, Chef Tom posted a recipe for Saltimbocca Alla Romana.

This dish sounds delicious, and since I am a prosciutto fanatic I know it won’t be long until I am preparing this in our kitchen.

Things are slowing down here for the season. We have over 250 cans of food in our pantry, and we really don’t have room for much more anyway. I do want to take the wife to the farmer’s market again this weekend, to see if any more fall fruits and vegetables have come in.

Now that things are caught up with the canning, we can start preparing the new garden location for next year’s bounty.

Our little garden is producing more vegetables this year than we have had in the previous three years combined. Night before last, my wife made several jars of pickles from all the cucumbers we picked this week alone. I will post pictures of the pickles (if any survive for the photo op) sometime this weekend.

Does anyone have any good cucumber recipes? I’m sure, with all the flowers I see on the vine, we are going to have a ton more, and I don’t think I can eat that many pickles.