Cooking our Sugar Snap Peas

This past week Julia cooked a dish comprising solely of the sugar snap peas that we grew in our garden. They were delicious and very easy to make. 

Here's what she did:

- Saute some chopped onions in a little bit of butter and olive oil until soft.

- Add a few tablespoons of water and the prepped sugar snap peas. Cover and cook on low for about 5 minutes.

- Take off the lid, turn up the heat and cook on high for a few minutes until the water cooks out. And you're done!

A variation could be to cook some bacon in the pan first, take out the bacon, and then use the leftover grease to cook the onion instead of the butter and oil.

Around the Garden

We've finally got most of the seeds into the ground, and the seedlings as well. The tomatoes are in the ground and doing well in my neighbor's yard (that I had asked earlier in the year if I could plant since she doesn't ever use her yard. I have also done a bit guerilla gardening, I transplanted winter squash and watermelons into the berm behind our house (they are the small plants that have the white plant id tags in the picture). By adding plant tags, I am hoping that the HOA maintenance people don't rip them out or spray them, and let them fill the bare spaces there in the berm. We have had some pretty busy weekends and evenings with the amount of time the garden has taken on top of taking care of two children and two dogs, but hopefully it will be worth it. Sometimes I start to get stressed feeling that I am getting behind on the garden or missing key windows for planting, but I just need to step back and enjoy the small successes that we are already achieving. As Michaela Cavallaro recently said in Organic Gardening: "I hope to be content with my successes--and accept the inevitable failures. Above all, I want to slow down. If we save a few bucks on groceries and eat a few more veggies in the process, so much the better."

Bush Beans

Today Antonio and I sowed some Bush Beans of the Medinah variety. We sowed some dill, radishes and carrots along with them. Here are a few pictures of the garden & Antonio trying out his new helmet.

Worms

On Wednesday our shipment of a pound of worms (approximately 500 worms) arrived. How exciting. Antonio was all oo's and ah's, but did not want to try to touch them. So our worms are now happily in their new home (or at least we hope), in our home-made compost bin. I am excited to finally start composting our kitchen scraps and producing our very own fertilizer. One step closer to closing the loop and being more self sufficient at our little homestead.

Harvesting Lettuce

This Monday night we harvested 2.1 ounces of our organic lettuce. That was enough for all three of us to make salads using only homegrown lettuce. Up to now we had been adding our homegrown lettuce to our store-bought lettuce. It was definitely a nice feeling to be eating something that we knew came about by the efforts of our labor.

Alfalfa Sprouts

I started another batch of alfalfa sprouts. Can't get over how easy it is to grow sprouts to have when ever I want.