Sunday Photo - Melon

I had two of my Athena Cantaloupe plants grow to maturity and I ended up with exactly two beautiful cantaloupes. At least they are both nice and big, with firm flesh and really great flavor! :)
Linking up with the new Orange You Glad It's Friday, Straight Out Of the Camera Sunday, Mandarin Orange Monday and The Country Garden Showcase.

Garden Update - It's A Jungle In There!

We have been getting rain recently and it sure does make the garden grow! The tomato plants and summer squash plants completely fill their 4-foot by 4-foot boxes and the tomato plants are starting to break free!
I have been harvesting quite a few of the French heirloom Ronde de Nice zucchini (small picture far right) and the Bennings Green Tint Pattypan squash, enough so that I have been selling some at the Farmers' Market. Jerry will only eat so many squash, ya' know. ;-)
The picture on the bottom left is an Italian heirloom eggplant, Listada de Gandia. I just love them, not only are they pretty but I like the taste and texture better than the Black Beauty eggplant. The bright yellow guy is a Golden Sweet melon and while it is certainly golden, they aren't very sweet and they are small, only about 5 or 6 inches long. I won't be growing them again.
The cherry tomatoes and yellow pear tomatoes are producing nicely but I'm still waiting for the bigger tomatoes to ripen. I found a great site that talks about freezing tomatoes until you have enough to can a batch and you can even freeze the cherry tomatoes!
What I didn't show ya'll is the "wildlife" that is living in my garden jungle. You know, the squash beetles and grasshoppers! Grrrr...
Linking up with The Country Garden Showcase and Mosaic Monday.

Garden Update - August 06, 2012

The garden is starting to produce nicely! :) I have been harvesting bush beans, jalapeno, pepperoncini and bell peppers, scalloped squash and Ronde de Nice French heirloom zucchini, cherry and yellow pear tomatoes, and strawberries. The cantaloupe are growing nicely and one of the Kakai pumpkins has started to turn. The only fruit I am going to get from the trees this year is Kieffer pears and they are doing well too. The big tomatoes are all still green but I noticed one starting to blush today! YAY!! I'm still hoping for enough tomatoes to can and make into tomato sauce this year. So far, it looks as though that will happen.
Linking up with The Country Garden Showcase and Mosaic Monday.

Garden Update - July 16, 2012

My garden seems to be slow to get going this year. Everything is doing well but I seem to be about a month behind where I was this time last year. I really hope I get a good harvest from my little garden and have enough tomatoes and green beans to freeze and can some for the winter. Now that our summer rains have started, it should really take off! :)
Linking up with The Country Garden Showcase, Mosaic Monday and Macro Monday.

Gazpacho

The first time I had gazpacho I was in my early 20s and on a date with my soon to be husband (now ex). He took me to a nice seafood restaurant on the pier in Redondo Beach, CA. Being a girl from Kansas whose parents had pretty simple tastes, I had never even heard of gazpacho and cold soup, why that was just WRONG! Well, it was one of the best things I had ever eaten. :) Seeing as how it wasn't something that my now-ex would ever willingly eat, that was the last time I had gazpacho for many, many years.

Fast forward 30 years (yep, I'm getting old!). We stopped for lunch after the Farmers' Market a couple of weeks ago and it was so hot that all I wanted was a salad and maybe some soup. When the waitress told me they had gazpacho, I promptly ordered it. I gotta tell you, for our little town, we have some pretty good restaurants. The gazpacho was good but kind of reminded me of "thin" salsa. Since then, I've been on a mission to find a good recipe. I recently remembered that Ree Drummond, The Pioneer Woman, has a recipe for gazpacho in her new cookbook "The Pioneer Woman Cooks - Food From My Frontier" so I decided to give it a try. I highly suggest you give it a try too!!

I did a couple of things differently, I omitted the celery because I didn't have any, I used salad shrimp instead of grilled shrimp (the rest will be used for Cowboy Ceviche later in the week), I used Clamato instead of tomato juice which I thought paired well with the shrimp, and I omitted the chopped hard boiled egg as a garnish. You can find Ree's recipe here.

All of the vegetables I used came fresh from the Farmers' Market Saturday but if you are lucky enough to have a garden that is actually producing, it would be even better! And just so you know, Jerry thought this was excellent (after being initially skeptical) and just the thing for supper on a hot summer day! :)
Linking up with Heidi for The Country Garden Showcase.
P.S. My blogging buddy Nancy at Little Homestead In Boise is doing a giveaway to celebrate her one-year Blogiversary! Hop on over and sign up, she's giving away some really cool stuff!

Garden Update - 06/18/2012

The only exciting thing happening around here garden-wise is the Echinacea has started blooming! :)
In the vegetable garden, everything is doing okay. The tomatoes have started blooming, the pepper plants are doing well, the bush beans are growing, the strawberries are blooming again, the pumpkin plants are growing nicely, my last surviving eggplant plant is making a recovery from being munched on, and I FINALLY got some summer squash seeds to germinate without the birds digging them up first!
Linking up with Mosaic Monday, Macro Monday and The Country Garden Showcase this week.

Garden Update - 5/21/2012

The pepper, eggplant and tomato starts got planted over the weekend. I was looking back over my blog from around this time last year and I am LOT further behind this year!

I also got seeds in the ground for bush beans, cantaloupe, chard, zucchini and Kakai pumpkins. I put the tomatoes in my square foot boxes this year to see if that helps hold the moisture in when watering.

Of course, I got all this finished JUST in time for our hottest week of the year with temps near 100 for the next few days and windy conditions predicted towards the end of the week.  :(

I also pulled all the turnips and rutabagas and half of the snow peas so that I would have somewhere to plant the summer produce. The chickens were very happy to see the greens! :) Now, I just need to cook all those rutabagas and turnips! LOL!!

My herbs in the pots are all doing VERY well! The volunteer dill and cilantro are already going to seed! The basil was a little slow to get going but it is doing great now and my thyme I started from seed is starting to grow pretty well too.

I think my favorite herb is the oregano that comes back in it's pot every spring, plus I love cooking with it! :)

Linking up with Heidi this week for The Country Garden Showcase.

Leafcutter Bees

When I was watering the garden yesterday, I noticed that some of the leaves on the snow pea plants had half-moon-shaped pieces out of them.

I knew right off that the Leafcutter bees were building their nests! I worked in the nursery at our local Ace Hardware for a couple of years and every year about this time, new people to our area would start bringing in plants with similar looking leaves. They always wanted to know what was causing this and when we would tell them, they wanted to know what they could do to kill the bees or make them stop. We would tell them that the bees were just building their nests and they would quit "cutting" the leaves in a week or two.

They usually cut my roses or the fruit trees, this is the first year I've seen them on the snow peas. It doesn't hurt the plant and heaven knows, we need all the bees we can get!

They got both sides of this leaf! It was fun to be able to grab my camera and take pictures of them hard at work! :)

In this picture, you can see the cut leaf just above the bee and the piece is grasped in it's legs as it prepares to take it off to the nest! You can read an article about them here.

Linking up with Heidi for The Country Garden Showcase and Lisa for Macro Monday.

Garden Update - April

The turnips and rutabagas are doing well.

We had mashed potatoes and turnips with our meatloaf the other day. YUM!!

The spinach is starting to bolt already but I'm still harvesting. The Romaine and onions are doing well.

It all made a nice salad with the last of the first crop of radishes.

The snow peas are really producing! Some went into a stir fry with shrimp and lemon recently. I'm working on harvesting enough for peas with leeks and bacon using the snow peas and regular peas.

The strawberries seem happy.

I'm going to have to cover them soon to keep the birds from eating them! :)

My "perennial" oregano is coming back nicely. I planted some thyme seeds in another bucket and they are just now starting to come up.

The dill re-seeded itself and I moved a couple of plants so that they are all in one location.

This was my original herb bed and there is still parsley, lemon thyme and wormwood going strong from the original planting about five years ago. I added onions and chives last year.

Finally, I re-potted the tomatoes, eggplant and peppers last week and they are all doing really well. I plan to put them out the second week in May. I will plant my summer squash, melons and beans from seed the beginning of May. Well, that is my update, how is your garden doing? Linking up with Heidi for the Country Garden Showcase this week! :)

Garden Update

The little tomato plants are growing nicely in my south-facing window...

...so are the peppers and eggplant.

The snow peas are growing well in the garden, they are finally big enough that I don't have to keep them covered to prevent the birds from eating them! :) The turnips, rutabagas, spinach, lettuce and onions are all doing well too...they are still covered but it was too cold this morning to uncover them for pictures! LOL!!

I need to get some more radishes planted this week, I have harvested almost all of the current crop. Speaking of radishes, what do you all DO with all the radishes you grow?!? There are only so many salads we can eat!
I tried a new recipe for braised radishes last week and it was really, really good! :) Just halve or quarter your radishes depending on their size and then cook them in a saucepan with a little chicken stock, butter and salt and pepper until tender, about 15 to 20 minutes. Cooking them takes away most of that radishy bite. I will definitely be making this again, I ate the leftovers for breakfast the next morning!! LOL!! I also tried a radish sandwich for the first time the other day, thinly sliced radishes on a nice crusty bread with lots of butter and salt. YUM!!

Linking up with The Country Garden Showcase and Macro Monday. 

Seeds Sprouting, Blackberry Bushes and Harvesting

Plants have sprouted in all the tomato cells! YAY!! The eggplant are just coming up and some of the peppers are starting to sprout. Some of these seeds are three years old so I wasn't too sure what kind of success I was going to have.

I also put out some onion sets last week and they are doing great!

I have been wanting to plant blackberries for awhile now. I'm not sure this variety is really going to do well here in our growing zone so I only bought two plants.

And, finally, I have been harvesting a few radishes here and there! Radishes are such a gratifying crop to grow, only 30 days to harvest! ;-)

I still have everything in the garden, except the onions, covered with lightweight frost cloth to keep the birds from eating it all. It's pretty cool because the sun shines through, I can water right through the cloth and it will help to keep the bugs out! Linking up to Macro Monday at Lisa's Chaos.

Starting Seeds for the Summer Garden

It is finally the end of February and I can start my seeds for the summer garden! YAY!! I have been itching to get them going but I didn't want to start them too soon (like last year) and have to transplant everything two or three times to bigger containers. I will transplant the tomatoes a couple of times though just because they seem to like it! :)

The tomato seeds are Dr. Wyche's Yellow, German Johnson (pink), Earliana (new for me), Yellow Pear and Sweet 100. The peppers are Red bell, Green bell, Jalapeno and Pepperoncini. The eggplant are both Italian heirlooms that I have grown for several years and really like, Listada de Gandia and Rosa Bianca.

Everyone is labeled and the containers are put into plastic bags and closed up.

I have this awesome, totally wonderful, south facing window that I use to start my plants! Did I mention how much I love this window?!? This will be my third year doing it this way and I have had really good luck with germination rates and growth. I have cut WAAAYY back on my summer garden this year because I intend to only grow enough produce for us. The past two years, I was growing produce to sell at the Farmer's Market. I'm linking up to The Country Garden Showcase hosted by Heidi at My Simple Country Living.

Santa Rosa Plum

The Santa Rosa has gone plum crazy! (Snicker, snicker!)

As you can see, the fruit trees were unfazed by last week's snow storm. Jerry had fertilized them recently and with the moisture, they are really taking off. The temps are going to be in the 60s and 70s here all week and I hope that was the last of the colder weather. We have been known to have a hard freeze as late as the end of April though.

I also wanted to include this picture because I really like the early morning shadow on our "Barrio" fence! :)

The plants in my little garden are all doing pretty good too. These have still been covered with the plastic.

My snow peas, on the other hand, have not...wish I could figure out "who" is eating them! Grrr! I believe I have the garden pretty rabbit proof but it could be a rodent of some kind or even the silly little birds who have claimed the garden as their own. We took down a bunch of fencing that I was using for trellis in the garden and I'm going to try to make some hoop covers to see if that will help protect the plants.

Linking up with Heidi at My Simple Country Living for The Country Garden Showcase.

Actually Using The Harvest From The Garden

I'm almost too embarrassed to post this! ;-)
We got absolutely NO peaches from our little tree last year thanks to the birds and that was in spite of having bird netting over the whole tree. But, the good news is...I still have peaches in the freezer from 2010's bumper crop! I know, I know, you are only supposed to keep fruit in the freezer for 12 months but, hey, I'm only five months past that and I sure wouldn't want to waste any of our yummy homegrown peaches!

I packed these in a medium syrup in pint canning jars and they have not gotten any freezer burn. It seems to me that the glass protects the fruit better than plastic. I decided I needed to use them up so I made a Peach Cobbler for tonight's desert. You can find the recipe for the cobbler topping using my Baking Mix here.

I have seen several posts recently about making sure that you actually eat the food that you grow and it kind of "guilted" me into trying to use up what I have. Besides, the silly fruit trees are BUDDING OUT already and I'm hoping I will actually get some fruit this year!!

Kieffer Pear



Santa Rosa Plum



Peach



Ornamental Plum

I'm linking up with Heidi for The Country Garden Showcase at My Simple Country Living.