Impromptu Dinner

So a couple of weeks back I got to house sit and had to come up with dinner quick. Begin raid on my edible garden :) I came up with these:

Lime basil; Canary bell peppers (not fully ripe); Early White Bush scalloped squash; strawberries; Bright Lights swiss chard; Dwarf Blue kale; Brandywine, Roma and Yellow Pear tomatos. John later contributed random cherry tomatos from his garden and ground turkey.

After a bit of thought I moved on to preparation:

And the final results:

So it all turned into ground turkey with cherry tomatos, chard stalks and lime basil; steamed squash with lime basil and olive oil; steamed chard and kale; stuffed peppers with cheese, chard, basil and Brandywine tomato; and Yellow Pear tomatos to munch on. Also fresh mint tea on the side :) It was good. I'm falling in love with stuffed peppers...

Cut and Come Again Harvesting

It's more than just a variety of zinnia :9 Turns out I've been doing this for awhile, just didn't know there was a term for it. Basically several species of leaf/head vegetable can be harvested by cutting 3/4" to 1" above the soil, and allowing new leaves/heads to grow out from the stump. You'll have to continue to water the roots and put up with a stump, but in a few weeks you have more edibles without going through seed starting.

Above is a shot of my lettuce pot about a month ago. I harvested the lettuce from it about three weeks ago, and being the lazy butt that I am I just left the stumps there rather than re-potting it with new yummies.

Fast track to this last weekend and you can see that one lettuce stump is now producing three new heads for my dinner salad. The only drawbacks to this method are putting up with a less than purty stump for a few weeks, and the new leaves/head that grow back do not grow as large as the original.

This method will also work for kale. One stump is regenerating one...uh...clump of kale, and the other is sprouting two. These are growing very quickly and the leaves look more tender than the original plant...

Spinach, broccoli and cauliflower are supposed to regrow like this also although I haven't tried it yet.

the Waiting Game

My Green Children are forcing me to be patient...

I have so many seedlings started and seeds I'm waiting to see sprout. I really want to be sure I'm starting enough of the flowers to fill mom's beds well. Some of the plants I started for my mom are almost ready to transplant...but the new flower beds aren't even started yet. My parents keep changing their minds about what they're doing to the yard. Last night we had a quick gruop talk to go over the contractor's recommendations. Because of the bad drainage in the yard it seems we're going to start completely from scratch so he can re-grade. Seems dad is going to spend more on this than planned-but improvements to their house are long overdue and that's the price of procrastinating. I may further edit the yard plan since we don't have to worry about only disturbing some areas... But if they don't start work soon I will have to scour the 99 cent store for larger cups/containers for the flower...

Two nights ago I set some seeds to pre-soak. Usually I only do that for the chard, beets and sweet peas, but I thought I'd give it a try for my next round of seeds. I was suprised to see the basil seeds developed an odd jelly coating.

The Blue Butterfly Bush I moved a couple of weeks ago went into shock. It did fine the first week, hence my happy post, but with the unusually early hot weather not so much. Since Friday it's been losing leaves and showing some signs of pallor. It got it's weekly watering on Sat, and I watered it again last night. This morning I lightly watered again with some liquid fertilizer to make sure it's getting nutrients. Now I need to leave it alone a few days and cross my fingers.

And I want my veggies! It's been a month or two since some of my larger veggies have been growing in their beds/permanent containers. I'm most surprised that the Cauliflower which are actually in the ground still haven't started growing their heads. The cabbage are getting pretty big leaves, but no cabbage head yet :/ But I'm most excited about my broccoli! They've been developing heads for a couple of weeks, one is nearly ready (I need to check info on the best moment to harvest). They're hanging basket is currently sheltered  by the storage shelves, the current heatwave was not playing nice with them (nor the kale, chard and lettuce).