Scenes from the Garden

Along with all the other fun in life, working in the garden has taken up time and has been a joy these past few weeks. We ate the first decent sized zucchini today (had a tiny one grilled last week...just a baby) and it was so good.

The new garden next to the steps up to the front door and deck is looking really great! The morning glories produce varied colors to welcome each day, the bright orange nasturtium flowers look wonderful next to the brilliant blue of the lobelia.

 In the main garden, near the barn, the peas and beans are up, along with tiny basil and nasturtium seedlings.

Sweet peas should be blooming soon and so should some lovely poppies. The transplanted lemon tree, rose and daphne shrubs are doing well and sending out new leaves. Here is the daphne, along with a beautiful pink geranium and bocopa.

 I think I'm going to have a bumper crop of pumpkins with seedlings that have sprung up from the pumpkins I put in the spent beds to compost. Should be fun to see what they turn out to look like! It's a treat each day to see the growth that spring brings! Look at how much they have grown since May 5th. I just thinned them out a bit, so they should really grow now. They share the barrel with seedlings for morning glories and zinnia.

 One of the biggest changes has been to the main planter near the walk
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 Here is a wide view of what I see from the kitchen window.

Ripe Tomatoes

As happens almost every year, this winter I started seeds for most of the garden I planted. Some years I do a vast number of tomato varieties, but this year I only planted three kinds. One is a grape tomato, sort of an elongated cherry tomato. Although I expected them to ripen first the one that actually is giving me enough tomatoes for salads is called Stupice. The tomatoes are about golf ball size and have a nice strong tomato flavor. Some of them have green shoulders at the stem end even when the rest of the tomato is fully ripe, but I just cut that part off and put it in the compost pile. A few of the grape tomatoes are ripe, too, but not many. The third tomato is my favorite Black Krim. They are lobed and get larger and are a brownish red and super delicious. I also planted the seed for them later than the others, so I probably won't harvest any until next month at the earliest.

Tonight we'll be having three kinds of grilled squash: white scallop, yellow scallop and zucchini. There will be sliced Stupice tomatoes with basil from the garden and Sweetie and Straight Shooter will enjoy grilled rib eye steaks from a local farm while I enjoy chicken thighs from a local market. A summery meal for a summers evening.

The morning glories are running rampant in the garden, climbing anything they can climb, including the tomato plants.

The lilies have just started to bloom, too.

I didn't really plant too many other flowers this year, devoting my water mostly to veggies. I'd like a few more cucumbers, too, but they have slowed down production. Only got one this week.

We finished our deck repair on the front of the house and even moved some wicker furniture and a rocker to the most recently repaired part near the door to the baking center. I just finished having a cup of tea while enjoying the rocker, a nice breeze and the company of Sweetie and Pi doggie. Bliss.

Hope you are having your own kinds of summer good times.

Eat From the Garden

Farm to table is really big right now in the restaurant world. That is probably a good thing because getting people to really taste fresh veggies and fruit soon after they are harvested might help generate demand for that taste hit in regular and fast food restaurants, to say nothing of in grocery stores.

Even better than farm to table is garden to table. To have planted the little seeds, nurtured them, set them out in the garden when the time was ripe, kept them going with regular water (and plant food as needed), tying up the tomatoes and re-routing the wayward pole bean vines, watching the first fruits form and grow and ripen...then to pick and eat that ripe food shortly after picking. Bliss.

I usually try to do as little as possible with the harvest if I only harvest enough to enjoy that day. Today I harvested enough lovely green bush beans for Sweetie and I to enjoy with our dinner. All they needed was a quick rinse and a rapid steam to turn them brilliant green and heat them enough to enjoy. Nothing else was needed! We had them last night, too. The thing to remember if you decide to grow bush beans is that they come in almost all at once...within a week or so. Great if you are canning them, but otherwise you need to pick them almost every day and figure out what to do with them. My pole beans seem to take a bit longer, so I harvest them less frequently.

The small tomatoes (Early Girls, I think) also got a quick rinse and then were sliced. The slices were laid on a platter and I sprinkled on a tiny bit of garlic salt and freshly ground pepper.

These tomatoes never saw the inside of a refrigerator, so they were room temperature. They taste like summer...juicy, tart, the essence of tomato. Last night's cherry tomatoes were even simpler. Wash, put on plate. Remove green top, eat, repeat.

If you don't have a garden or a neighbor who wants to share, try a good farmer's market. It will be almost as fresh and very, very delicious.

For those who are keeping track, we now have a counter and sink and faucet in the baking center, so washing up is easier. The photo of the tomatoes and cutting board shows a sliver of the new quartz counter top. Still no regular stove or oven, but Sweetie is patching some dry wall tomorrow and I'll be working on the mural this weekend, so it won't be too much longer before I can bake again.