Another dinner made with all of our own vegetables...
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams
Showing posts with label peppers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peppers. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 30, 2017
No salt but lots of peppah!
These are the 4 types of peppers we're growing this year.
And they make for a beautiful dinner!
Another dinner made with all of our own vegetables...
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams
Another dinner made with all of our own vegetables...
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams
Wednesday, August 02, 2017
Garden glory
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| Hubby among the okras. |
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| Our grapes finally did something this year! It's because, for some strange reason, the vermin you call deer haven't mowed it to the ground like they usually do. |
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| Peek-a-book, winter squash! |
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| Some sunny summer squash. |
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| Corn! I get so excited about corn. |
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| The requisite zucchini |
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| We have had really nice potatoes this year so far. No vole or insect damage. |
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| A typical harvest: mostly grown, some scavenged (chanterelles). |
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| Dinner is served! |
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| And where you find zucchinis, you can find zucchini products. This was a particularly tasty muffin recipe. Very moist. I didn't need to smother them with butter like I usually do with muffins (because, IMO, the only good muffin is one that has been thoroughly killed by butter). |
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams
Monday, April 02, 2012
The seedlings are up
This past week, I decided to re-enact the famous Edvard Munch's The Scream. I'm sure some of you can commiserate. Not only do I not have enough time to get everything done, but the *&^% satellite internet provider has put us on bandwidth curfew again. So I apologize for not getting around to reading your various blogs but there's no arguing with our malevolent bandwidth overlord.
Hubby has started the seedlings indoors. There are celery, broccoli, lettuce, cabbage, tomatillos, tomatoes, peppers, onions, and frisee.
The onions are pretty distinctive, being long and grassy:
Outside the strawberries are blooming! I'm excited. We only have 2 beds, but I hope they both do well.
What have you got started? Trying anything new this year?
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams
Hubby has started the seedlings indoors. There are celery, broccoli, lettuce, cabbage, tomatillos, tomatoes, peppers, onions, and frisee.
What have you got started? Trying anything new this year?
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
How does our garden grow?
Before I get into blathering about our garden, I want to give a shout-out to Product Body's fantastic Giveaway! Head over to The Soap Bar blog to find out how to enter; Joanna's products are incredible! You can thank me later. ;)
Thinking about the nursery rhyme leads me to suspect that Mary wasn't the one being contrary; it was probably the garden pests who were contrary! (Unless, of course, you take it as the political allegory that it is and from the view point of Elizabeth I, Mary was rather contrary; but I hate talking politics.)
All sorts of things conspire to make your garden a failure: rabbits, voles, aphids, caterpillars, chipmunks, and, yes, even birds. They blithely nibble on your plants and berries, snipping off and killing young shoots before they have a chance to realize their dreams of becoming a full-blown plant. The garden is a sad, rough place to raise a seedling.
Still, we persist, year after year. Or hubby persists, and the kids and I help to nurse his eternal optimism.
So to answer "how does our garden grow", I thought I'd show some photos of the progress. I think I took these photos Tuesday morning (June 7th). These are by no means all of our garden beds. Some are still empty (well, maybe just one or two are), and some I just didn't take close-ups of (example, cucumbers, squash, grapes).
A sweeping view of the south garden, outside of the main fenced garden. Our dilapidated chicken tractor is at the left-hand side. Hubby fixed it now though, so I'll have to show a photo of his handiwork some other time.
Looking inside our main fenced garden...it's hard to take in all 27 beds in there at once:
The bib lettuce, co-existing with the frisee:
The lettuce, nearly bolting, with some beets in the foreground, not quite big enough yet. Interspersed are dill that keep self-seeding in our garden.
Speaking of self-seeding, here's a volunteer lamb's quarters:
The cabbages are doing beautifully...
In fact, dh used one for cole slaw:
...but the broccoli is just getting started:
One day soon, we'll get some peas:
More frisee, cohabiting with the celery this time:
The asparagus are still going strong, amazingly:
as are our garlic, which won't be ready for harvest for another month:
Our strawberries are pretty much done:
But other things are just getting started, such as eggplants:
and sweet potatoes:
Regular potatoes:
Lima beans:
Peppers:
Tomatoes:
And green onions - front - (this is the half bed inside the main garden, and not the six beds outside the fenced area) and basil - back:
Dh made some yummy meals again. This was a faux gyros with brown rice instead of pita, and our tomato sauce instead of chopped tomatoes (since our tomatoes haven't ripen yet). Complete with my homemade Greek yogurt and homegrown asparagus:
This was just using up some left over dilly new potatoes. Dh made a homefries sort of concoction, topping it with one of our eggs.
We're actually low on eggs right now. The heat shut most of the chickens down, and one hen went broody so she's not laying. *&^% freeloaders. We might have to dispatch with this current group and get a bunch of new ones. Unfortunately, ds#1 is rather attached to one of the hens, Licorice...actually most of the hens except for Four of Five...so we may have to keep them for longer. I never knew he was quite so sentimental.
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams
Thinking about the nursery rhyme leads me to suspect that Mary wasn't the one being contrary; it was probably the garden pests who were contrary! (Unless, of course, you take it as the political allegory that it is and from the view point of Elizabeth I, Mary was rather contrary; but I hate talking politics.)
All sorts of things conspire to make your garden a failure: rabbits, voles, aphids, caterpillars, chipmunks, and, yes, even birds. They blithely nibble on your plants and berries, snipping off and killing young shoots before they have a chance to realize their dreams of becoming a full-blown plant. The garden is a sad, rough place to raise a seedling.
Still, we persist, year after year. Or hubby persists, and the kids and I help to nurse his eternal optimism.
So to answer "how does our garden grow", I thought I'd show some photos of the progress. I think I took these photos Tuesday morning (June 7th). These are by no means all of our garden beds. Some are still empty (well, maybe just one or two are), and some I just didn't take close-ups of (example, cucumbers, squash, grapes).
A sweeping view of the south garden, outside of the main fenced garden. Our dilapidated chicken tractor is at the left-hand side. Hubby fixed it now though, so I'll have to show a photo of his handiwork some other time.
Our strawberries are pretty much done:
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Our garden, a little tour
I promised I'd show you some pictures of and around our garden, so here goes...
This is one of our several semi-dwarf apple trees. They're about 6 years old, and not producing like the dickens yet. The fruits tend to be small and ugly (we don't use chemicals), but the flavor is so complex, it's like the best Pink Lady you've never eaten. ;)
I didn't get a photo of the Asian pear tree, but these are just a few of the fruits we harvested:
I bought a couple of geraniums from someone selling them for 4-H earlier in the year, and, for some reason, they just never did very well. One of them is finally putting out a bit more bloom:
...but the other has one foot in the grave, apparently:
And speaking of grave, one of our summer squash plants bit the dust - a sad combination of the fruits not being harvested enough while we were away and borer worm damage.
Sometimes, though, what looks like death just means it's ready to harvest. Take these sweet onions, for example:
The yellow onions are not quite harvest-ready yet:
We finally bought some grapes to plant this year! Here's a close-up of one of the 3 plants:
From farther out, you can see they're kind of tiny and pathetic. Deer got to them one evening (before dh put up the fencing) and munched one heavily.
The opposite of tiny and pathetic would be our tomatoes. Dh thinks it's because of the grass clippings mulch he's been putting on them, but these babies are 8 feet tall!
We're growing several varieties, as usual, but these grape ones are especially cute and tasty:
The corn is doing splendidly too:
We had our first meal of it Friday evening. Look at those lovely ears: 
Wandering around, here are some of the (messy) leaks:
and some mildly spicy yellow peppers that dh thinks might be Hungarian yellow:
One of our green bean beds:
The celery always does pretty well for us. Because we don't "blanch" them, they retain a very strong flavor that you'd never find in ones from the store.
Inside the greenhouse, we have the Japanese eggplants which have never failed us yet. They're not bitter like the fat eggplants that are more common and the skin isn't tough either.
And here's another killer tomato plant inside the greenhouse (notice how it presses on the ceiling?).
Most people grow flowers to attract bees and other pollinators. We just grow flowering veggies, which are useful/tasty as well as pretty. Here's a bee on a gai lan (an Asian green) flower:
Not from our garden, but this is the wackiest case of a dead frog. Yup, you read right: it's dead, but looks amazingly alive. Dh found it in the pool. Fascinatingly creepy.
Do you have anything wacky or fascinatingly creepy to share? Hope you're all enjoying the weekend!
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams
This is one of our several semi-dwarf apple trees. They're about 6 years old, and not producing like the dickens yet. The fruits tend to be small and ugly (we don't use chemicals), but the flavor is so complex, it's like the best Pink Lady you've never eaten. ;)
I didn't get a photo of the Asian pear tree, but these are just a few of the fruits we harvested:
I bought a couple of geraniums from someone selling them for 4-H earlier in the year, and, for some reason, they just never did very well. One of them is finally putting out a bit more bloom:
...but the other has one foot in the grave, apparently:
And speaking of grave, one of our summer squash plants bit the dust - a sad combination of the fruits not being harvested enough while we were away and borer worm damage.
Sometimes, though, what looks like death just means it's ready to harvest. Take these sweet onions, for example:
The yellow onions are not quite harvest-ready yet:
We finally bought some grapes to plant this year! Here's a close-up of one of the 3 plants:
From farther out, you can see they're kind of tiny and pathetic. Deer got to them one evening (before dh put up the fencing) and munched one heavily.
The opposite of tiny and pathetic would be our tomatoes. Dh thinks it's because of the grass clippings mulch he's been putting on them, but these babies are 8 feet tall!
We're growing several varieties, as usual, but these grape ones are especially cute and tasty:
The corn is doing splendidly too:
We had our first meal of it Friday evening. Look at those lovely ears: 
Wandering around, here are some of the (messy) leaks:
and some mildly spicy yellow peppers that dh thinks might be Hungarian yellow:
One of our green bean beds:
The celery always does pretty well for us. Because we don't "blanch" them, they retain a very strong flavor that you'd never find in ones from the store.
Inside the greenhouse, we have the Japanese eggplants which have never failed us yet. They're not bitter like the fat eggplants that are more common and the skin isn't tough either.
And here's another killer tomato plant inside the greenhouse (notice how it presses on the ceiling?).
Most people grow flowers to attract bees and other pollinators. We just grow flowering veggies, which are useful/tasty as well as pretty. Here's a bee on a gai lan (an Asian green) flower:
Not from our garden, but this is the wackiest case of a dead frog. Yup, you read right: it's dead, but looks amazingly alive. Dh found it in the pool. Fascinatingly creepy.
Do you have anything wacky or fascinatingly creepy to share? Hope you're all enjoying the weekend!"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams
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