2012 Garden

Last week (at least I think it was last week, my random lifestyle has my weeks all blended) my mom and I finished planting our garden. Like last year, I am taking advantage of her double lot and we are co gardening a bunch of vegetables.

Here we have asparagus (year 1), peas and some tomatoes.

kohlrabi and spinach

Peppers, broccoli and carrots

Pickles, cucumbers, zucchini and yellow squash

more tomatoes (we can them for year long use)

some green onions, but the late summer/fall home of Brussels sprouts! Yum!

Herbs. On the left is thyme, rosemary, dill, cilantro and chives. On the right is basil, parsley and sunflowers.

2012 Garden

The past couple of weeks my mom and I began our seeds for our summer garden. And when I say mom and I, I mean mostly her. As she says, I am the busiest unemployed person....so my schedule is tricky.
Anyways, back to the plants. Mom planted: tomatoes, cucumbers, pickles, yellow squash and zucchini. We will also be planting lettuce, spinach and carrots once we get outside.

Then I came over today with some herbs to plant and brussel sprouts, but that has to wait a few months before we plant them.

We plan on digging in the garden in May, and I look forward to a season of free veggies!

My Version of Greek Salad

One of the best things about gardening is not having to pay for produce. I'm a fan. But there is one thing I am not a fan of. Lettuce. I like salads, they are good for me, especially seeing as I am dieting. However, lettuce bores me. I need LOTS of toppings on my salad. And I love stocking them up with veggies, meats and cheese. Sometimes I make salads without the actual lettuce. My Greek salad is one of my favorite combinations.

1 can of chickpeas, drained and rinsed
4 Roma tomatoes, diced
1/4 red onion, diced
1 cucumber, seeded and diced
10 kalamata olives, halved
3.5oz package of Feta cheese
pinch of salt

Combine and enjoy! I have also done this where I added a drizzle of olive oil. And I am sure it would taste good over a bed of lettuce or with some noodles.

My Love Affair With My Freezer-Preserving Food

So, lets not tell Joe, but I have a not so secret love affair with my freezer. The thought of wasting food makes me sad...I don't want to throw money away. So while my freezer has the normal things in it: veggies, ice cream, the husband's chicken nuggets, most of my freezer is filled with excess foods. I buy large quantities of butter and freeze the extras, I buy most meats and sea foods in bulk to save money and freeze them in serving size portions. Lately I have learned the joy of freezing things I would not have thought of to freeze. For example, I learned how to freeze bagels. This helps me eat them at my slow pace with my ever changing taste buds. Earlier this month I posted two blogs about recipes: Pumpkin Chip Cookies and Cinnamon Rolls. I have some of both of those in my freezer right now; half the cookie dough and one pie plate full of rolls. And this week I have started preserving veggies from my garden in my freezer. I don't have time to cook them as fast as they grow, and I would hate to waste my food. So I have shredded zucchini in my freezer and sliced, blanched summer squash! Yay for fresh food year round! Now if only I had a stand alone freezer....

I don't think I have enough freezer bags in there....

Canning with Mom

I convinced my mom to can with me! I was setting up to do it one day at home and realized that it was silly to do all that work by myself. Thankfully, my mom will try anything once. This includes overheating her kitchen so we can have homemade produce year round.

Tuesday we canned the tomatoes. We were able to fill four pint sized jars. Today, we already have enough to fill another four or five. So next Wednesday or Thursday we will be doing a round two.

Today we put our pickle plant to good use and produced three cans of relish! Unfortunately, I forgot my camera so I don't have pictures of how badly we destroyed the kitchen on that endeavor.



We'll see how many jars we take up next week!

Veggies!

Pickle, cherry tomatoes, plum tomato, cucumber, yellow squash and green onion! Yay for fresh, free food!

Gardening Success!

From my co-garden: tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, green pepper and pickle.

Balcony Gardening

Living in an apartment doesn't leave many options for gardening, thankfully we have a balcony so I can container garden. We are growing tomatoes, onions and herbs on the balcony.

This year we are doing things a little differently. We are digging up part of my mother's yard to expand her garden so that she and I are going to co-garden there. Here we are planning on growing zucchini, summer squash, cucumber, pickling cucumber, more tomatoes and onions, and peppers. The plan is to can pickles and tomatos so we have enough to get us through next year!