Summer Crops

We have moved the seedlings outdoors permanently.  Our garden is heavily slanted towards salsa and pasta dishes...

Dan is quite excited about the six pepper plants with visions of a mean jar of salsa dancing around in his head.

I am excited about those tomato plants and having yummy fresh herbs on hand.

The dogs?  Well they don't give a crap what we grow, so long we spend a minimum amount of afternoons out in the backyard.

The cucumber seeds and dahlias have already started to come up.  The cherry tomato plant seeds haven't.  Of course as soon as we planted everything outside we had a couple of days were hit 98-103 in the first part of the week and then dropped to low 50's for the end of the week... let's hope those seedlings are resilient.

Spring Crops

The other night for dinner 75% of what was on our plate was from a family farm.  The salad (with the exception of the cucumer- too early for that) was from our garden and the brats (sans bun- just mustard) were from my parent's farm.  Pretty cool. 

Now I am going to try my hand at radish pickles with the remaining of our crop...

Spring Garden Update

Our spring veggie gardening has gone quite well... 

Our salad stuff turned out to be very tasty.  The tomato seedlings haven't died yet.  The parsley continued to grow like mad.

The lettuce mix, radishes and arugula were a bit slower than they should have been due to the cold temps and few days of sun. But they still made it.  I am not sure if we did enough to acclimate our tomato and pepper seedlings to the outdoors but we took them out as often as we could once they were in their own containers, where they grew likely crazy.

We decided to pick up some herbs at the farmers market instead of doing them from seed like we usually do.  Maybe next year we will start them early like we did for the tomatoes and peppers.

The spring flowers were bust. The pansies never grew quite right as they stayed flat instead of growing upwards... likely as there was no sunshine to reach towards.  The yellow blossoms were still cheerful, even if the plants did look a little sad.

We are moving to the next phase of the garden to get ready for the summer growing season.  Our fingers are crossed that the weather improves.

Spring Gardening

We have been making progress on our spring garden.  The dirt has been prepped, the radishes and lettuce planted, the spring flower pots done, and the seeds are started...

Poor Shelby was not feeling so great last weekend.  But the dogs still enjoyed getting to spend an afternoon in the backyard.  And I learned the lesson of checking if all of the pots made it through the winter... several of my small flower pots were cracked in half so had to improvise and doing something different from my usual set of small pots lining the steps.

We started the tomato, tomatillo, and pepper seeds.  It is quite the anticipation builder to have little pots of dirt that are full of promise for awesome heirloom tomatoes! Fingers are crossed.

The romas, gold medal tomatoes and tomatillos were the first to pop up.  Dan is hoping the peppers follow soon!  It has been pretty chilly so we are using the heating pad to add a little bottom heat which is suppose to help get the seeds started.

The radishes and lettuce have not quite popped yet.  It has been a week of gray skies but the upcoming week is forecasted sunny-ish days so...

I spy...

The garlic I planted back in March is growing!  We are excited to already have something to spy on in the garden.  If all of these turn into bulbs we are going to have a lot of garlic on our hands...

We are impatiently waiting to plant our seeds to get this garden season going.  Spring is way to slow.

In The Garden

We are quite pleased with our tiny stock of canned tomatoes, salsa, and peppers.  It has been so much fun to add this activity to the mix.  It has also been fun to see how proud Dan gets of his jalapeno pepper plants... we have more than enough peppers for two people!

When I was canning my measly three jars of crushed tomatoes a couple of Sundays ago, I couldn't help but remember the massive amounts of canning we would do with my mom every summer when I was growing up.  What a trooper my mom was directing three kids to help her through all the steps of canning jars upon jars of marinara sauce with no air conditioning in our small farm house kitchen!  And we weren't exactly all calm or quiet.

I am finding canning to be a fairly relaxing, enjoyable experience.  This definitely something that we want to do more of in the future.

In The Garden This Week

Lots of new additions, and subtractions to the garden this week.  We managed to pick three huge tomatoes along with a dozen or so Jalapeno peppers.  We figured that the best way to get the most bang for our investment is to start canning our harvests.

We purchased the starter canning set along with a dozen pint jars.  After searching the internet for recipes and instructions we started the sterlization process.  It was a relatively easy thing to do with the right tools. 

 We are really pleased with the gardens progress and can't wait to pick more tomatoes and peppers and eventually carrots and onions.  We have also been freezing a ton of pesto.  And of course eating stuff from the garden as well - homemade salsa verde is now one of our favorites.