Okay beautiful people. One thing that has certainly been a constant takeaway from gardening: This is a constant state of learning. I don’t think that will ever change. At least I hope it doesn’t, that sounds boring!

The first real harvest of food that we’ve had out of the garden this year has been radishes. I grew the white hailstone and the purple plum variety.

Radishes are fantastic because they can be grown so early, way before the last frost they can be planted, and they are incredibly fast growers, so the harvest is quick.

I was told today by someone that the heat of the radishes depends on the heat of the day. Now, I planted these pretty darn early, but we have been having some pretty hot days and I have noticed that the radishes have been hotter in flavor. I am going to do some more looking into this to see if I can find an answer because honestly I love a nice mild radish without the heat.

Next question I had, as I am munching on these radishes: What benefits am I getting from these delicious beauties? Turns out, radishes are pretty high in vitamin C, which is great for lots of reasons, but Vitamin C helps with collagen production, thus being great for your blood vessels and skin!

They are also full of lots of other vitamins and minerals in smaller amounts. As well as fiber! They also have antifungal properties.

Okay so….shift! Because basically other than other random things like herbs and tatsoi that I should probably eat more of…that’s about it for what I have harvested.

Well, that is also a lie. I made 14 pints of strawberry rhubarb jam. Which was great. Now, I’ve never had enough strawberries to make jam out of them. I almost don’ t know if I ever will, but who knows, life is long and my strawberries love to send off loads of runners and expand out of their designated territory in a moments notice.

I did use freshly picked rhubarb though for the recipe, along with 6 lbs of strawberries that had been hanging out in the deep freeze for the past 9 months.

I will find the link to the recipe, because I really did enjoy it. I have only ever used commercial pectin once and it was for a dandelion jelly. Which was also really fun yet exhausting to separate all of the petals from the sepals.

Instead of using commercial pectin, this recipe uses granny smith apples. You peel and core them (SAVING BOTH!) and then you grate the rest of it. You put the peels and cores in cheesecloth and put that in along with all the other ingredients. Now I will say I did get away with using less sugar that was called for, because when I tripled the recipe it brought it up to something along the lines of 21 cups of sugar and honestly that just felt sickening, so I wanted to see if I could get away with a little less and still have it gel. Well….I won’t say it gelled as well as I would’ve liked, but because there is just so much fruit in the mix, it really did end up being quite the lovely thick jam. I think it is going to work perfectly well. Uncertain if this blog has commenting allowed but I sure would love to hear other’s experiences with this recipe.

The past few days I have been taking a break from going crazy to get the garden planted. I put beans in water to soak, but then didn’t have time to get them in the ground, so I threw them all in a wide planter with some soil as somewhat of a temporary holding place, hoping I will be able to transplant them once I get the time.

Today is my husband’s birthday! So I made him his favorite huckleberry cheesecake. Now depending on where you are, huckleberries can be a variety of things, or so I hear. Here in Montana, we go up into the mountains and fight the bears for them. Kidding. Totally kidding. If there’s a bear, the bear can have them. But there definitely are bears in the vicinity and I am super grateful that we have never run into one.

Here’s the cheesecake recipe I use

:http://madeleineeffect.com/2015/07/huckleberry-cheesecake/

It has also been ridiculously hot outside so I decided to get some soups canned inside. I am very tired of not having lunch ready to go, or good ingredients to make good food when I come in from gardening and am absolutely so dog tired that all I want to do is go out to eat instead of cooking but know that is absolutely the opposite direction than I want to be headed when it comes to my lifestyle…that being said, it is okay to eat out sometimes, just in case you needed to be told that. You do enough, I promise.

Looks like that’s all for now. Although I have SO much more I would like to share. I suppose this will be helpful for me to look back on over the years, but hey it may even be at the very least…mildly entertaining for someone? I don’t know. And that’s okay.

Happy Gardening!