Floral Beauties - Roses

Roses are my favorite flower of all!

And Red Roses are my favorite of favorites.

My wonderful husband bought me this rose bush

for our 17th wedding anniversary and

it has been an amazing parade of roses.

For about the same price as one bunch

of roses from the flower shop, he gave

me flowers all summer long, yearly!

A great investment, I'd say!

Fireworks and Apricots

Today we had a great and productive family day!

We had the fun of firing off fireworks together.

Then we finally started to harvest the apricots.

As you can see they are small,
but there are a lot of them!

After washing them, we started to cut them up.

But given how many apricots we have,
I knew that was going to take forever,
so I decided to use my chopper to
speed things up a bit.

The older boys helped with the pitting process.

8cups apricots (pitted and de-stringed)
1/4cup lemon juice
5cups sugar

Bring to a rolling boil and boil for 30 minutes,
stirring FREQUENTLY.

Apricot jam bubbling; water-bath coming to a boil.

Almost ready!

Time to fill the jam jars:

Now for 10 minutes in the water bath.

That's beautiful!  :)

One of my readers asked what I was going to do
with my apricots.  Well, this is the first step.
We're going to try drying some as well,
as well as get another batch of jam going.

Plus, we're just going to eat some
of them FRESH, of course!!!

Garden Progress

Well, everything has been grow, grow, growing!

The onions have been harvested!

The cherry tomato plant has gone wild
and has had to be hog-tied.

The squash plants are finally getting their growth
and starting to put forth some fruit.

This particular squash must have grown
from a dropped seed.
It is growing between
2 layers of fence!

A determined plant, I'd say!!!

Now that the peas have finished their glory,
the green beans are pouring forth multitudes of pods.

 The okra are starting to grow and have
sturdy stalks to stand firmly on.

Note to self:  transplanting okra is NOT good.

Not only that, but the asparagus bed is coming along nicely!

The apricots will be coming off the tree,

probably next week.

Yum!  Apricot Jam, here we come!