Things Are In Full Swing

The other day, my mother asked me if I had planted my garden yet this year. Uh... weeks ago!!! So I guess it is time for a little update as to what is 'growing' on around here:

Arugula that was started from seed is ready for harvesting. 

Seed started baby radishes will be hitting a salad near me soon. 

Red Leaf Lettuce started from seed. 

Parsley, the flat leafed Italian kind.

My family isn't a big fan of Cilantro, so I use the Italian Parsley in my Black Bean and Corm Salad. It is a great dish for summer picnics and pot luck suppers. It is always a big hit and it is super easy. I never have leftovers and I always get asked for the recipe. 

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of frozen corn, thawed
• ½ cup of finely chopped red onion
• 2 tbs of seasoned rice wine vinegar
• 2 tbs of olive oil
• 1 tbs of lime juice
• ¼ tsp of sea salt
• ½ tsp of ground black pepper
• 2 cans of black beans, rinsed and drained
• 1/2 chopped red bell pepper

Directions:
In a large bowl, whisk together the vinegar, olive oil, lime juice, salt and pepper to make a dressing. Add beans, corn, onion and pepper and toss until coated.

Cover and chill for about 2 hours before serving. 

I am back!!!!!!!

We had a very long, very cold winter here in the northeast. But even so, for about the past month, I have been thinking about my little garden. I watched from the kitchen window, patiently waiting for the snow to melt away.

The month of March would give me hope with a warm day in the 40s, only to have a cold front sweep in and deliver snow and 20 degree weather for a few more days. But the days are getting longer and the sun is moving across the sky, shining into my windows in the morning and on to my little patch of earth.

In a few more days, it will be April. March and all its weather madness will be gone.

Today's Harvest!

The warm sunny afternoons and the rainy evenings have been a garden delight. The replanted beds of lettuce are coming up. The new spinach and arugula squares are starting to sprout. And the tomatoes, cucumbers and squash are happy!

Summer is in Full Swing at the Square Foot Garden

Summer is in full swing right now and so is my garden. The spring lettuce has had it's run and now the fall planting is starting to make its appearance. 

Our cabbage is ready to harvest, but it looks so nice, that I hate to take it so soon...

The bell peppers that were just tiny little buds last week are almost full size.

 My summer squash is coming showing a lot of growth. There are also many blossoms on the vines, so I am expecting many more!

And here is the beginnings of a little tiny cucumber. Cucumbers have been one of my favorites, ever since I was a little girl, and nothing can compare to the freshness of a garden cucumber. 

I replanted several of my squares this week with the beginnings of what will be my fall crops. I have new carrots, a batch of spinach and two new lettuces that took over the squares where the onions, broccoli and the old lettuce had been. More on them to come! 

Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers

These little beauties will soon be covered in olive oil and garlic salt and hitting the frying pan.

And my mint is ready for a nice herbal tea... or some hemp oil and tea tree soap. 

And last but not least, this little bud is what will soon be an eggplant. I love eggplant. 

You are never too old to learn something new!

Since this is my first year as a serious gardener, I have had to supplement my produce with a few other items that I didn't start early enough to grow or that I didn't have enough boxes to be able to plant this summer or that just weren't practical. I have been going to a local farmer's market to get sweet corn, strawberries, cherries and fingerling potatoes.

Last week when we were getting the last of the season's strawberries, I saw the little cute cucumbers that are used to make pickles. I have three children that ADORE pickles. They would eat them everyday if I let them. Maddie was with me and said.... Can we PLEASE make pickles?

So I decided that, yes, we would make pickles.

It was much easier than I anticipated. All we had to do was slice up the pickles, put them in the jars and then pour the vinegar and spice mixture over them. 

They got put into a simmering bath for 20 minutes.

And voile, we had three pints of pickles. 

Of course it was so easy that Maddie wants to go get a whole case of jars and a giant basket of cucumbers and make a LOT more. I was thinking that I could make tomato sauce, salsa and apple sauce. I might even do some peaches in August just like my mom used to do when I was growing up. 

A Beautiful Quiche

Many years ago, more years than I care to remember at this time, when I had just Leo and he was small, I belonged to an organic vegetable co-op. For an investment of a few hundred dollars prior to the beginning of the growing season, you could buy a share of the upcoming season's crop. It introduced us to all kinds of locally grown organic produce that I would have never seen normally.

One of the nicest things that they would do would be to include a few recipes in the share boxes to teach you how to use all the new and wonderful items that you were receiving. One of my all time favorite recipes from this experience was for a zucchini pie. It is actually a quiche that has zucchini, onions, a bunch of herbs, cheese and of course, eggs.

In keeping with this summer's theme of "it has to come from the garden or the chickens" I made two of these creations over the weekend.

Of course the boys are much bigger now and have a developed a much greater appreciation for vegetables. There were no leftovers this time. Both were devoured in one sitting. 

Things Are Really Growing Now!

The most amazing thing about my garden is that I am a complete novice gardener. And here I am, half way thought the summer growing season and I have all these terrific veggies... and herbs and some things are on their second planting of the season. 

Here is my second harvest of broccoli.

I am still getting lettuce from the first planting, even though it is showing a little bit of "bolt." I have already planted a second batch of Butter Crunch lettuce. That is Leo's favorite. 

My basil that I started from seed is doing pretty well. I just need to fine that culprit that is putting little holes in it so I can send them somewhere else. 

The Italian parsley is looking great. I have gotten a few harvests from it so far.

And the dream of every Italian gardener... the coveted Roma tomato. These will be roasted in garlic and olive oil and then made into sauce as well as other things. 

You Really Can Just Eat Eggs and Veggies!

I have been teasing the kids, ever since I planted my garden, that if I got good enough at growing veggies, I could stop going to the grocery store. I jokingly told them that we could just gather eggs from the chickens and harvest things from the garden when ever they got hungry.

Then I saw this thing of beauty, an egg with greens, roasted tomatoes and avocado slices on some nice grilled bread that looks almost too heavenly to eat.

How perfect would this be for breakfast, lunch or dinner?

I make egg sandwiches all the time, but I never thought to make one with veggies.

Tomorrow, I will collect the eggs from the chickens, snip off a leaf or two from some of the broccoli plants and see what I can come up with.

I can't wait!

In My Spare Time...

What do I do when I am not gardening? Well, since my square foot garden doesn't require a huge investment of time, I have started to dabble in some other ventures. I was introduced to essential oils a while back by one of my best friends, Terri, and then my sister-in-law, Julie.

The thing with essential oils is that you don't necessarily just use them by themselves. They get added to something to make them better. I have wicked dry skin so one of the first things I started doing was adding them to body butters that I made from scratch using Shea butter and other natural products.

I have a few really good recipes for body butters and a few other things and have been making those things for a few months now. So today, I decided to try my hand at making some soap. This was a clear hemp based soap with tea tree oil.

Hemp soap tends to dry out your skin a little and tea tree oil has some anti-fungal and anti-bacterial properties, so they made the perfect combination for an acne soap for my teenagers. 

I don't know how it is going to work, but it was fun making it. It also gives me recipes to dabble in that don't expand my waist. 

We Have Some Serious Veggies Happening Here

It has been hot and rainy. And I have had some very happy plants because of it. My broccoli plants are doing amazingly well and are almost ready for harvest.

My tomatoes are coming along as well. These pictures were actually taken at night. I got a new cell phone last week and it has a fairly good camera. I decided to test it out by taking some shots at night. So these were taken during last night's thunderstorms.

Leo, my middle son, is in love with the very fresh produce that we are able to pick on a daily basis. He is lobbying for a green house now.

I was actually thinking about a greenhouse myself to extend the growing season. They have some very nice, reasonably priced kits.

I will have to keep you posted on that...

Grow an Abundance of Food with Help From Your Garden Solution - CPA - May 2014 - Central Pennsylvania

A wonderful article about square foot gardening and the secret to its success.



Grow an Abundance of Food with Help From Your Garden Solution - CPA - May 2014 - Central Pennsylvania

A picture is worth a thousand words...

These pictures this week pretty much speak for themselves. And notice, no weeds!!!! Yay!!!

Broccoli

The whole garden.

Lettuce

Carrots

Dinner this week is going to be a lot of salads. Look for my creamy Italian dressing recipe later this week. 

Two Weeks Exactly

It has been exactly two weeks since I planted the lettuce seedlings. We have had plenty of rain, lots of sunshine and some nice warm afternoons.

It is growing faster than teenagers! :-)

Grilled Garden Veggie Pizza

Do you know all those great summer pizzas all the recipe sites are showing? The ones with the wonderful garden fresh vegetables? I make those often. They are very simple and so delicious.

I can't wait for a few more weeks until I can enjoy my harvest on some terrific summer pizza.

I was never quite happy with my pizza crusts when I had to cook them in the oven. Pizza stones and cast iron skillets made them much better, but a good restaurant quality pizza crust kept escaping me... until last summer.

Last summer, my good friend, Lynette introduced me to the Pamper Chef Pizza Grill Pan. Lynette isn't giving me anything for this little plug.

Now I make my pizza on the grill. The thing that I found out about grilling pizza is that it is fast and it results in an excellent crust. If you want it to be even faster, you can pick up a store bought crust in the freezer section at your grocery store. My Juniata County friends can find frozen pizza crust at Schlegel's... because Schlegel's has everything! lol

You can get the grill temperature up into the 500 to 600 degree range and have a crisp crusted smokey flavored gem. Use you garden veggies as topping and an you have the perfect summer dinner to pair with a salad... grown in your garden of course.

These are my actual pizzas cooked on my grill with a Pampered Chef  Pizza Grill Pan. If you are looking for your own pizza grill pan, you can check them out here: Lynette's Pampered Kitchen

Lettuce Growth Update

This was my lettuce last week when I transplanted it:

And this was my lettuce today!

It's all filled in and you can't even see the soil. I think I may get a salad out of it later this week. :-)

Success!!!!

After impatiently waiting for a little over a week... today I was greeted by little carrot sprouts. They are my very first garden plants to sprout from seeds.

Ameraucanas

This little chick is going to grow up to be a prolific egg layer. She is sometimes called the Easter egg chicken and her eggs will be shades of light blues and greens. I also got some Rhode Island Reds. 

The fresh eggs are going to make a great addition to my garden fresh produce. 

You can learn more about caring for chickens here: http://www.the-chicken-chick.com/2013/06/10-tips-for-healthy-chickens.html

Wait, water, repeat...

and think about what I am going to put in my other two gardens that I will be adding. :-)

Getting Down to Business

First we added the special growing mix. Thanks kids for lugging and lifting those bags!

The next step is to add the grid to give us the one foot square planting plots.

Here are my first few transplants. :-)

And here are my finished plots, all planted and ready to grow! The plots on the right have carrots, basil and Italian parsley seeds. The carrots are a special short variety. Now I just have to add sunshine, keep it watered and wait...