Tomato!

Happy Friday!

Here's a picture of some of our tomatoes that are growing!  This tomato plant is an Early Girl variety.  We bought it from a lady at the Farmer's Market who has been selling plants there since 1991.  Very excited about all the different recipes that I will try with tomatoes this summer.

Have a great weekend!

The Kindness of Neighbors

I am loving this gardening community.  I love that I recognize faces and I'm starting to remember names of people that I see around the garden.  I have almost met all of my garden neighbors and I have to say I have some of the sweetest neighbors.  I spent some time talking with one lady and her daughter.  She has been gardening for 15 years at Willie Streeter Garden and she was telling me about all the pros and cons to community gardening.  She even started showing me what certain bugs look like.  (By the way, I hope the potato bug and potato beetle stay as far away from my plot as possible.  They leave some pretty nasty holes.)

We got to talking about plants that grow well in the community garden and which ones don't.  We spent awhile admiring her tomatillo plants and she gave me a whole armload of them when I was leaving.  She said that her absolute favorite part about gardening is sharing her fruits and vegetables with people.  I was so grateful for the time that we had spent talking.  And loved seeing her kindness.  She could have taken those tomatillos home or even given them to a friend instead of some girl that she had just met.

I can't wait to make something with these tomatillos and I will definitely share the recipe with you.  

What are you harvesting out of your garden these days?  

  

Community Garden Potluck

We had a community garden potluck at the beginning of May.  It was nice to share a meal and get to know some people.  I'm finding out that I'm surrounded by some very experience gardeners and I'm so happy that they are willing to share information and help me along the way.  I'm grateful for my garden neighbors that can tell me when my carrots need to be harvested and explain to me what bolting lettuce even means.

What struck me the most was that it was nice to be around people that see the benefit of gardening.  I still don't know a lot about the people that I get to share a community garden with, what I do know is that they see me.  They know that I am a Christian that cares about eating locally and feels like I can do my part to be help the earth.  Even though there are probably a lot of things that they probably don't agree with me on, this might be the first time that they have ever learned that Christians care about the planet and want to do something to repair it.

As the summer months continue it will be nice to see how friendships develop and how even though we all come from different walks of life, we all share a community garden.

Freezing Peas

There is something about freezing vegetables and making jams and jellies that make me feel like I'm storing things up for a harsh winter when food is scarce.  It's completely silly and these thoughts probably stem from reading American Girl and Little House on the Prairie books at an early age.  I froze my first bag of sugar snap peas this week.

I was given this book a few Christmases ago and I'm so excited that this year I will finally get to use it.  This book is amazing and has a wealth of knowledge in it.  If you want to learn how to harvest, can, freeze or dry this is the book for you!

  

If you are working with sugar snap peas you will want to remove the flower part of the pod and pull out the string.

Once you have that done you are ready to blanch the peas.  Put the peas in boiling water and boil for two minutes. 

Immediately, put in ice cold water to stop the blanching process.  Place in freezer bag and stick in the freezer.  The faster the process the better tasting the peas will be.  

Enjoy!

Menu Monday: Lemony Kale Pasta

Menu Monday!

Hope everyone's gardens are doing well in this crazy heat.

Another recipe for everyone that is still reaping a kale harvest!  This was such a simple dish to put together and doesn't take a lot of ingredients.

Lemony Kale Pasta
I got this recipe from this blog

For the Dressing
2 cloves of garlic, peeled
1/2 tsp salt, divided
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, finely grated
6 TBSP extra virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
Juice of 2 lemons
pepper, to taste

For Pasta
1 lb penne pasta
Large bunch of kale, washed with stems removed


Bring large pot to boil for pasta. Then, make the dressing.  Mince garlic cloves and add 1/4 tsp of salt to garlic.  Use fork and knife to make a paste out of the garlic.  Put garlic paste in small bowl.  Add in Parmesan, olive oil, lemon juice, red pepper flakes and pepper.  Whisk together until combined.

Cook pasta in boiling water.  Chop kale into 1/2 inch ribbons.  Add kale to large bowl and pour dressing over kale.  Stir to coat the kale.  Pour kale and dressing over cooled pasta.  Serve with added Parmesan cheese over it.

Harvesting Peas

Our sugar snap peas are ready for harvesting.  I found these peas hard to judge when I thought they were ready to pick.  Everything I read told me to pick them before the pod filled all the way out because they would be sweeter that way.  

I asked a fellow gardener what he thought of the peas.  He assured me that they were ready to pick and that if I didn't believe him that I should just pick one and try it myself.  I did.  It was my first experience of picking something right off the vine and eating it.  Yes, I'd been harvesting kale and romaine, but I've been going home and washing it and preparing it before I eat it.  Oh and the peas were wonderful!

Jeff and I haven't been too inventive with eating peas.  We have been putting them in salads and I froze my first batch this morning.  More on that later.

Any recipes that you are trying out with your pea harvest?

Harvesting Romaine

Our Romaine lettuce is beautiful!  It's a pretty green with reddish-brown speckles on it.  I never splurge and buy romaine at the grocery store because iceberg lettuce is always a little cheaper.  I've gotten so use to the taste of plain old iceberg lettuce that it was hard for me to want to eat this romaine.  Now after a couple of harvests, I'm completely obsessed.

Harvesting greens was a hard concept for me to get.  If you talk to people or google how to harvest romaine or kale (or any kind of lettuce really) you get different answers.  Some say that you can cut off the tops of the green, others recommend to harvest a couple of whole leaves off of each plant and some tell you to just pull up the whole plant.

Victoria and I decided to go the route where you pull off the whole outer leaves and leave behind the smaller ones.  It's been working great because I pull off enough greens for a day or so and then I come back and the smaller leaves are ready to eat.  This has really made our romaine go far for the both of us.  Jeff and I enjoy salads every evening with dinner and we are always looking for other ways to eat romaine.