Lettuce Have Breakfast

Picked the first lettuce leaves of the season today. They really shot up after all the rain we had this week. I don't have a pic of the garden because it is raining, but here's the maple sausage biscuit & jack cheeze sandwich my husband just ate with fresh buttercrunch. Yum!

Umm, so it's been a year....

I've been gardening, just not blogging. I do still find my blog useful occasionally though, so I'd like to try to keep it a little more up to date.

For instance, this week I noticed my chive plants were finally blooming. I thought for sure they were about a month late, and I remembered that two years ago I'd kept notes on harvest times. So I looked back at that list, but lo and behold, they were right on time. Amazing how your memory can be so wrong!

I'm still living in the same home, although hoping to move. For a variety of reasons, we just haven't put the house up for sale yet. My son is now 2.5 and keeping us busy. Therefore, I'm continuing to go light on gardening and trying to keep things simple.

Here's a few pics I've managed to take so far this spring.

On March 31st I had my first harvest: some baby chives that I used on potato salad for our Easter dinner. They really put this humdrum side dish over the top!

     

And this is my strawberry bed on April 21st. Unfortunately you can only see 2 strawberry plants, and the rest are romaine and buttercrunch lettuces that I'd just planted. The triple digit heatwaves last summer burnt my poor strawberries to a crisp, and this is all that came back. Compared to this photo from 2010 it really is so sad. Hopefully they'll survive and send out some runners for next year. 

I also planted a few flowers in the back, along with some wild violets I'd successfully transplanted from our lawn last summer. 

That's it. Not very exciting, but at least it is something! We'll see how much I can blog the rest of the season.

Tah dah! Summer garden is in!

I finally got around to planting my garden yesterday. Even though I hope to sell the house over the next few months, I figured I should at least make the garden look nice. I'm going to try to sell without removing it, hopefully someone will like it.

The garden was a pretty big mess, since last fall I was too busy with my 11 month old son to do any cleaning up, and unfortunately my husband has a brown thumb. So as you can see below, the before pic is pretty ugly! But I'm happy with the after pic, even though I have a few more finishing touches to complete (like fixing the fence). You can't see much b/c they're still all seedlings or seeds, but you get the idea. The entire list of what I planted is on the 2012 garden plan tab.

 Before

After

Now the other side of the yard was an even bigger mess. I'm embarrassed to show this before pic, but I guess at least I had a decent excuse. The good news is a month or so ago I removed everything and replaced it with grass seed. That side of the yard was just too hard to maintain, the paths grew so many weeds and it never really got enough sun. So even if I wasn't selling the home, I'd decided last year to remove it. I didn't really believe one little bag of grass seed would fix it, but lo and behold it came out great! I can't get over how you can't even tell there was a garden there 2 months ago.

I guess that is a testament to the benefits of concrete block gardening. One of the reasons I originally chose them was so I could move them if needed (low cost being the other reason). I was really happy to find out that they truly were easy to take apart.

  Before - beds 1 and 2.

After!

Garden (& Home) For Sale!

Big news here at the Grow Peace household! I got a new job about an hour away from my current home. So we're going to move to a bigger home somewhere close to that job. That means my current home and garden are for sale! Anybody want to buy a great little house?

Here's also some gardening pics just for fun. I had two patches of arugula completely survive the entire weirdly mild winter. Here they are I think sometime in late February or early March (unfortunately my cell phone doesn't seem to save the date! So annoying. I really need to buy a new camera)

We are definitely going to buy a new home with plenty of space for gardening. I can't wait to build a new garden with everything I learned from doing this one. It is going to be awesome!! And I'm sure I'll have lots to post on my blog about it, so please stay tuned!

P.S. This is not an April Fool's joke. My garden really is for sale!

I'm Not Dead Yet!

Happy New Year everyone! It was a wonderful holiday season for the grow peace family. I hope you enjoyed yours too.

Winter has been especially mild so far, especially compared to the last two years. So we were able to enjoy a salad on Christmas day with fresh cut arugula from the garden! It was very simple, just the arugula, red onions, oranges, almonds and a vinagrette made mainly with fresh squeezed orange juice and mustard.

 

We also had vegan 'goat cheeze' crostini, with fig balsamic jam, topped with fresh garden sage. It wasn't just a pretty garnish - it really did taste better with the sage. Our roasted potato side dish was flavored with fresh rosemary from the garden. Easy yet delicious.

I was really happy we were able to have a few treats from the garden for our holiday feast. It just makes things so much more special when you're grown them yourself!

July Harvests

I feel really bad about neglecting my blog all summer! I can't believe it has flown by so quickly. We've had lots of fun taking K. to the beach, boardwalk, hiking, and swimming in the pool.

Unfortunately the garden was not as great as all that. It was another relatively unlucky year, with a 106 degree heatwave killing the blackberries again, a gopher devouring all my green beans and cucumbers, blight on the tomatoes, mislabeled peppers, carrots choked out by weeds and now I've even got poison ivy but can't identify where it is in the yard. Yeesh! Lately I've felt like plowing it all under and replacing it with sod! Of course I'm not going to do that, but I may downsize to just one side of the yard. We'll see how I feel.

In any case, here is a photo roundup of pretty much everything I harvested in July. At least there was something, I guess!

 Albino Peppers

 Little Dickens and Cubanelle Peppers

 Tiny Jalapeno's (Supposed to be Grandpa's Favorite)

 Very Spiny Cool Breeze Cucumbers (All I got before Gophocalypse)

 Genovese Basil

 Aunt Mollie's Ground Cherries

 Napoli Carrots & Gold Ball Turnips

Good ol Purple Top Turnips

A Berry Delicious Harvest

Last year it seemed the heatwaves killed off most of my strawberry patch. But I was wrong! To my great delight, we had quite a good harvest this year. To the left is the 1st ripe strawberry, picked on May 20th.



Then over the next two weeks I picked all of these (and another bowl, but the picture is still on my camera):

I ate them in several delicious salads and a heavenly chocolate breakfast. Details and recipes will follow soon in another post.

Cilantro City

Check out my herb garden - it is growing wild!

It isn't the greatest picture since it was late in the day, but that may be for the best since I need to get out there and trim them. I'm not really complaining though -nothing not to like about an abundance of herbs! I am going to try to use as many as possible over the next few weeks, before they get attacked by summer bugs. (I wish I could get them all in the dehydrator, or frozen, but I know I won't have enough time to pick and clean that many leaves).

The cilantro is so tall it looks like a city. Of course that means they're already starting to bolt, but I don't mind. Letting them go to seed last year is how I got this whole crop! I think the frilly tops taste just as good as the larger leaves at the bottom anyway.

Tonight I harvested some cilantro, mint and chives to attempt  to replicate a Peruvian quinoa taboule we had at a restaurant called El Tule in Lambertville over the weekend. (the mint is in another corner of the yard by the ferns, also growing like wildfire) Mine was low fat, and theirs was better, but it turned out pretty well for a first try. Very refreshing, and thankfully cooling since I served it with very spicy chipotle field roast sausages. (we did have avocado too, it just isn't pictured) Keep scrolling for the recipe.

Spring Herb Quinoa Salad

2 cups cooked quinoa

2 tsp olive oil

scant 1/2 cup each chopped cilantro, mint & chives

juice of 1 lime (or to taste)

salt & pepper

avocado slices (optional)

Mix all ingredients except avocado. Mound on plate and place avocado slices on top.

I've got a colony of ferns!

I'm so excited! The one edible ostrich fern I planted in 2009 has formed a colony. They all sprung up this spring. I counted about 8 crowns.

Unfortunately, I missed the harvest window again this year. I swear the fiddleheads didn't unfurl until June last year, but as you can see above they are well past that stage already. That's ok - I read on garden web that you shouldn't really harvest them until they've established a colony anyway.

Next year is going to be the year! I better make sure to be out there looking for fiddleheads every day in April.

18th Century Kitchen Garden

I went hiking with the family at Washington Crossing State Park this weekend and found the cutest little treasure: an 18th century living kitchen garden. Here's the official blurb about it and some pictures I took:

Johnson Ferry House This early 18th-century gambrel roof farmhouse and tavern near the Delaware River was owned by Garret Johnson, who operated a 490-acre colonial plantation and a ferry service across the river in the 1700s. The house was likely used briefly by General Washington and other officers at the time of the Christmas night crossing of the Delaware. The keeping room, bedchamber and textile room are furnished with local period pieces, probably similar to the furniture used by the Johnson family from 1740 to 1770. The site also includes an 18th-century kitchen garden.

I was impressed the garden looked so good this early in the season. I recognized almost all of the plants, and have grown most of them too. I saw cabbages, lettuces, onions, strawberries, various herbs, asparagus, fennel, and more. The assistant gardener came out and spoke to us for a bit. I commented how much bigger their lettuces were than mine, and she said they did grow some things from seed, but also used starts - so I didn't feel too bad my garden isn't as nice. lol

There were two beds full of lots of little plants that I didn't recognize. You can see one in the very back of the last picture I posted above - it looks like a light green rectangle. She explained that was flax, and how they used it to spin linen. She told us how it was a lengthy process with many steps, which sounded pretty fascinating. The other bed I didn't recognize was alfalfa that she said they were just using as a cover crop. I would have liked to talk to her more, but we had to get on our way since we had the baby and dog in tow.

There were lots of interesting things to do at this park. We spent two half days there hiking and exploring. I can't wait to go back when K. is a little older so he can appreciate the historical and natural events they have for kids, plus the open air theater.