Planted Some Plants

We broke down and bought a few perennials and shrubs for our flowers beds! It became a family affair to plant them over the weekend. 

We bought everything pretty small (cheaper) and tried to give them room to fill in over time. One of my pet peeves it when people plant things way too close together--it may look good at first, but in a few years things get overgrown!

In the shade we added three laurels and three purple heuchera, and in the sun we planted grasses, salvia, daylilies, a mini Colorado blue spruce, phlox, rudebeckia, and a purple sand cherry.

We love these grasses! We want to go buy a bunch more and spread them throughout the landscape.

Oh, and I also got this lime green hydrangea! I absolutely love it and hope it adapts well to our soil... they prefer acidity, which we do not have in Utah!

It kind of looks like we're getting somewhere. I'll refrain from listing everything we still need to do to finish the yard...

Homemade Pickles

You know it is time for action when you have seven cucumbers on your counter and your family is already getting cucumber fatigue.

I looked up a pickle recipe online and tried it out. It's a little too sweet for me so next time I'll probably cut back on the sugar.

Refrigerator Pickles

2 large cucumbers
1 small onion
2 stalks celery
1 green pepper
1 clove garlic
Dill 

Boil:
1 c. sugar
1 1/4 c. vinegar
1/4 c. salt (or less)
1 1/2 c. water

Slice vegetables thin. Put in plastic or glass container along with dill and garlic. Boil brine mixture and let cool. Pour over sliced pickles and refrigerate. Ready to eat in 2-3 days and keeps well.

(Recipe adapted from cooks.com)

Happiness

A sweet friend of mine gave me this' little book of cheer' for my birthday. It has some profound snipets of wisdom that echo my own feelings about nature and happiness. I am feeling rather sentimental today so I think I'll share a few...

 "The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things."

 -Henry Ward Beecher

"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy, is to go outside...
 amidst the simple beauty of nature."  -Anne Frank

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength
that will endure as long as life lasts." -Rachel Louise Carson

"Happiness... not in another place, but this place, not for another hour, but this hour." -Walt Whitman

"Today, whatever may annoy, 

The word for me is joy, just simple joy: 

The joy of bright blue skies; 

the joy of rain; the glad surprise

Of twinkling stars that shine at night;

The joy of winged things in their flight;

Whatever there be of sorrow

I'll put off until tomorrow!"

-John Kendrick Bangs

Lunch

I took a picture of my lunch today because it was so good. I LOVE fresh garden produce!!!

We had fried zucchini and onions, plus a big bowl of green beans for dinner on Sunday and these were leftovers because we couldn't finish them all. And that was after Ella ate almost a whole plate of beans herself! They are delectable with a little salt and butter...

I don't have any red tomatoes yet but my neighbor does, and they shared some with us. (More on that in a minute). There is nothing in the world as good as a garden tomato sandwich. My father-in-law taught me to make it with hummus, which ups the delicious factor even more!

I planned on eating chips & salsa too, but I was too full so I saved it for snack time. I recently got a salsa recipe from my brother-in-law that is to die for! My jalapenos and onions are ready for picking so I made it to go camping last weekend, and it got scarfed by young and old! Here is the recipe for anyone interested in trying it:

JT's Salsa

One 15 oz can of tomato sauce
3-4 tomatoes (or 3-4 handfulls of grape tomatoes)

4-5 jalapenos (seeds mostly removed)
0-3 serrano or fresno chilis if available
10 mini sweet peppers or mild banana peppers or 1 - 1.5 large sweet bell peppers
1/3 cup sweet onion
1-3 cloves crushed garlic, depending on size
cilantro
juice from one small lime or 1/2 large lime

The more variety of peppers, the better it tastes. Use the best tasting tomatoes you can find.

My usual spices:
cumin, coriander, paprika, oregano
I don't measure, but I only use these sparingly, maybe 1/4 tsp each.

Sometimes I add:
fresh ginger root
horseradish (1/2 tsp)
parsley
chives

Put everything in a food processor, starting with the spices, hot peppers, and tomato sauce. Then add the rest & run it until it chops it to the desired size of chunks.

Back to my tomato sharing neighbor... He has a special pruning method that helps set fruit sooner. He pinches off every little offshoot from the main canes of the plant and stakes them up really tall. I think cutting back on the vegetative growth sends the energy into fruit production sooner.

I thought about doing this myself because my tomatoes are huge sprawling masses of vegetation and they only have small green tomatoes on them so far. I learned, however, that my tomato variety 'Celebrity' is determinate, meaning it is bred to grow to a certain height or size, and then stop. Indeterminate varieties, on the other hand (such as Big Boy, Early Girl, Beefsteak, and most heirloom varieties) continue growing and producing vines until the frost kills them back. Only indeterminate varieties should be pruned. Maybe next year I will try a few of each so I can get early and late tomatoes.

State of the Garden

Feeling the need to document the growth of our garden in the last month (compare here). It has exploded!

We harvested our first green beans for Sunday dinner yesterday. Mmmmmmmmm, they are so good with butter and salt!

My tomatoes are getting humungous! A construction worker in the lot behind me told me I would get more tomatoes if I removed most of the leaves from the plant, but I am skeptical about that one. I do try to remove any leaves that lay on the soil to prevent molding or rotting, but there are plenty of tiny tomatoes developing as it is. Any thoughts?

In the meantime I might need to go buy some tomatoes because I've got a bumper crop of jalapenos. Time to try some salsa recipes!

We've got a few pumpkins on the vine already.

The curcurbits (pumpkins, cucumbers, cantaloupes, and watermelons) are taking over the world. I thought I had given them each enough room to spread, but I am constantly redirecting vines so they don't grow into one tangled mass!

The corn is taller than me and has tassled out.

I love this time of year... sunflowers and thunderstorms make me happy!

Volunteers

There is a benefit to being lazy and letting a few things to to seed in your garden. The seeds get buried and tilled in, and the next year they volunteer!
 

You can see at the end of my row of peppers there is a baby cantaloupe plant. There are three others in various places at the end of the garden where they grew last year. I know I missed harvesting a few small ones that went mushy, and now they have reproduced.

What doesn't belong? Beet, beet, beet, tomato, beet... I didn't even see it there until it was taller than the beets. I'll take it, since a few of my tomato plants broke off at the base in a big windstorm.

My yard always has sunflower seedlings in the summer. Usually I pull them up like weeds, but I left a few next to the garden to make it pretty.

And pretty it is!

Gardening With Kids

A talented friend of mine recently asked me to do a gardening post for her blog about teaching children, Dresses and Messes.  This is what I came up with:

Kids soak up whatever you expose them to, so get them in the garden  this summer and make growing things fun! Here are a few easy tips:

Give them space of their own. My girls were each given a small row of the garden to plant whatever their little hearts desired. Of course they were drawn to the pretty flower  packets over the veggies, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to beautify the garden too!

Read the back of the seed packet together and demonstrate the proper  planting methods, talking about measurements, spacing, and depth. They  will think it’s so cool!

Of course the best part is seeing their own plants sprout and grow! Maddie was so delighted when her marigolds popped up. We have yet to see the  flowers but I’m sure it will be a happy day!

Involve them in the harvest. My girls love, love, love peas. They are so excited when the pods form, and when it’s harvest time they ask multiple times a day if they can go pick peas. There must be something magical about opening the pod to  find the sweet little spheres inside.

Cook together! Show the kids where the veggies go after harvest. When they see the process  from garden to table, they will be more excited to eat them! Above is a  pasta salad we have been making that I learned at Girls’ Camp. Put  noodles, veggies, meat, cheeses (parmesan and feta are delish), and  ranch dressing in a gallon bag and shake it up! It’s also fun to let  kids choose what toppings they want and make their own in small sandwich bags.

Identify plants. Talk about the names, shapes, and colors of each plant, and they will  remember! Case in point, we recently visited an Aunt and while checking  out her garden, Ella exclaimed, “There’s the carrots!” I guess I figured she knew where ours are in the garden because of the placement, but she recognized the leaf shape enough to identify it somewhere else.   

Search for bugs.  This is the best part. Apparently sunflowers attract ladybugs and my girls  love finding the ladybugs and letting them crawl all over them until  they take flight. 

Search under and around leaves and you never know what you’ll find! Act like a kid yourself, and loose a few minutes watching and ant crawl around.

Occasionally you’ll find something spectacular, like this dragonfly that let the  kids hold it! Now that’s something they will remember.