Garden and Preserving Update

I've challenged myself to preserve something every day for a month, more or less through August 28 if I can keep it up.  I'm doing this challenge alone because I haven't been able to recruit anyone to join me. 

Food I've preserved in July (all Virginia grown):

• lamb stock, canned 3 qts., 4 pts.
• stewed tomatoes (from our garden), canned 3 qts., 2 pts.
• corn, canned 17 pts., froze some too
• beets, canned 2 qts., 8 pts.
• pickled beets, canned 8 pts.
• peach jam with honey, canned 7 half pts, one 4 oz.
• kosher dill pickles (from our garden), lacto-fermented 3/4 gallon
• dried a few sprigs of basil and some hot peppers from our garden.  (I don't have a dehydrator.  I've resisted buying an electric one, and the solar one I want to make is a big project for us, and won't get done this year.)

In the garden, this has been our best year yet for peppers, we have beautiful bell peppers this year.  Bugs have not been much of a problem this year, but weeds have, especially bindweed.  

The potatoes got some kind of disease that causes wet mushy spots on them and zero production.  We just harvested them today and we got less than what we planted.  This is a huge disappointment because I love potatoes and want to rely on them as a calorie crop.  Luckily, we won't starve this year because of it.  Wherever we garden in the future we will need to pay a lot more attention to both soil fertility and crop rotation.

I've planted a bunch of medicinal herbs in a new raised bed, and when they didn't germinate my husband planted them all again under a layer of straw while reminding me how bad I am at planting, but they still aren't growing.  

There is a volunteer watermelon trying to grow in our gravel driveway for the second year in a row, although we don't remember ever disposing of any seeds there.  It's doing quite well, in spite of not being watered or fertilized and my husband's affinity for spraying the driveway with Roundup, but it waited too late to grow and the frost will get it before the melons are ready, as it did last year.  If we're here next year, I'll plant a watermelon in the driveway on purpose, early enough for it to mature fruit.