Garden on June 29

The garden is off the hook, simply put. It is insane. Every morning when I take the dogs out, I take a look at it, feeling like a kid on Christmas excited to see what's there. As you can see from the last several posts, we have harvested a bunch of fruits/veggies and have used them in a couple of different ways. I've made zucchini bread and salsa, and yesterday Dennis asked me to make him a veggie sandwich, using cucumber, banana peppers, red onion, and spinach. The onion and spinach were store-bought, but hopefully my spinach seedlings will be edible soon!!

Spinach. I can kinda make out the leaves!

We got the cucumber from AJ's garden. Last night Dennis went out to fix out tomato stake-funnel thingy and as he was wandering around with his trusty Maglite, he spotted a monster cucumber. AJ said we could have it, so Dennis picked it and took a picture of it next to his arm to show how big it was.

 Huge cuke, plus a close-up of the bionic arm! I used that cucumber in his veggie sandwich.

Speaking of cucumbers, here's one of ours. It's probably about 4 inches. I found a recipe that uses cucumber in salsa - yum! Also, as Dennis remembers from The Other Guys, cucumber water is extremely refreshing. :)

Here's my next big zuke. I had 2 that got to this stage and then crapped out, so I harvested them and saved the bulb part in the hopes that it would be salvageable for my next batch of zucchini bread.

These carrots are crazy, but it looks like they are all growing in a big clump. Every one I have harvested looks like a gnarled finger. Sorry for the visual.

Here's my lettuce. It's probably about an inch off the ground, which means I need to start thinning it out soon. That makes me sad. I don't want to waste any!

My cilantro. Looks kind of weird, I know. But it has been doing better since I picked the flowers off of it. I won't let it go the way of my first spinach plant. *cry*

This is my strawberry plant. We had some strawberries, then some birds ate them. Ever since then, the tendrils have been crawling everywhere but no more strawberries yet. The main plant is at the bottom and you can see all the vines crawling every which way. Dennis took my cage off because he thought it was holding the plant back. Well we'll see... now that the birds aren't intimidated by the scary cage, I don't know what's going to happen.

This is just a shot of how many freakin purple peppers there are. I'm waiting to see if some of them turn red. So far I have used the purple peppers in salsa and Jamaican jerk pork chops.

FINALLY! A jalapeno! This has been the last plant to bear fruit (other than the peanuts, which grow underground, so who knows what the hell is happening with them). I can't wait to make something fun with these, like jalapeno poppers.

My bell pepper! Look how big it is. Now I just have to wait for it to turn red.

This is the insane watermelon plant. It crawls everywhere, and it has little tendrils that reach out and curl around anything within reach.

But it's gonna give me watermelons!! This is the biggest one I've found so far. Notice I used the word found, because you really have to search around the vine to find these. I'm sure once they get bigger I'll be spotting them left and right.

And one last beautiful picture to end on. This is the flower that has bloomed the most on either one of the black-eyed susans.

Garden on June 20

I know I am updating ridiculously frequently, but the garden has gone insane in the past few weeks.

Exhibit A: Banana peppers.

 Above are 5 that are pretty much ready...

And there are more on the way!

These purple coffee peppers are so out of control. I counted 16 today, and I may have missed a few. Last week there were only 7. Say whaaaaaat?! I think I need to start picking some.

My green peppers are starting to grow too! The second pic is my biggest one so far, about 2.5 inches!

Little cucumbers are really coming back to life. Hallelujah! It looks spiky.

Look how crazy this zucchini is. It grows like a light bulb! Or a balloon animal.

This is the biggest zucchini. I think it might be ready to harvest.

I planted lettuce seeds a few days ago and they are sprouting...

As are my spinach seeds! Hopefully I will have better luck with the seeds than with my first plant. I let it flower, which you are not supposed to do, and my spinach was ruined. We threw it out and I planted the seeds in its place.

Pulled some carrots out today and shared them with the doggies.

Black-eyed Susans starting to come in nicely.

And finally, today's harvest. I don't know if the purple pepper is ready, but I am going to try it and see what it tastes like. 2 green cayenne peppers on the left, and a 4 inch banana pepper on the right. Ta-da!

Green Monsta

So I dunno if you picked this up from my last post involving mushrooms, but I am attempting to go vegetarian. Emphasis on the word attempt. I've been doing it for about 3 weeks now and I've only had 3 or 4 slip-ups! That is, if you even call them slip-ups - my vegetarian coach Brett told me that turkey is a vegetable and bacon is a fruit, so except for that Buffalo Chicken sandwich I had last weekend, I am in the clear!

Anywho. I was looking for some vegetarian recipes and I found this website called Oh She Glows. The author, Angela, is vegan, which is a little too hardcore for me, but I am still interested in trying some of her recipes. She has this smoothie drink called a Green Monster that piqued my interest. She had a recipe for a basic one on her site, but I kind of just used her recipe as a jumpoff point. She has a ton of different recipes that I want to try, but my first one was just kind of basic.

Ingredients
spinach
1 banana
frozen berries
coconut milk
ice

No amounts, except for the banana. Yea, so sue me. I just eyeballed it, and added more stuff as it blended. Let your hair down already geez.

Maybe this visual will help.

Or this one.

Basically throw it all in the blender and hit blend! Then drink.

My first attempt - not so green.

Second attempt. Greener!

 

Much better! And you can't taste the spinach. It is supposed to give you a ton of energy. I'll be putting up other recipes with different variations as I make them. To look for more recipes yourself, check out her Green Monster Movement.

Awesome Poppy Seed Salad Dressing

Over Christmas weekend, we went up to PA to visit Dennis' family. On Christmas eve, we had an awesome dinner thanks to Dennis' dad, Doug. Ham, corn, biscuits, mashed potatoes, & gravy. Num num num!

However, the salad is what I couldn't get enough of! After I had one salad and a main course, when I went back for seconds I had to get another salad. It was spinach with cranberries and slivered almonds, but what really made the salad was the dressing. Turns out Vicki had made the dressing herself and she passed the recipe along to me. So here I am passing it along to you.

Ingredients
1/4 cup white vinegar
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 tsp paprika
1 tbsp poppy seeds
2 tsp minced onion
1/2 cup vegetable oil

I'm sure there is some rhyme or reason to adding the ingredients together, but I just added them to my container in the order they were listed. I used a gravy shaker for this and it worked wonderfully.

The amounts are written on the side which made for easy measuring. Just give it a good shake right before you pour it over your salad.

Vicki's salad consisted of spinach leaves, dried cranberries, and slivered almonds. Dennis is not a fan of almonds, so our salad is a little different. We used a 50/50 Mix of bagged greens that contained spinach leaves and other greens, kept the dried cranberries, and added some goat cheese.

All I can say is... OMG. It was so good! I had a little extra dressing in the bowl when I was done, so I just kept adding greens until I was mopping it up with pieces of spinach. Yummy. Thanks Vicki!!