The Farmer's Garden

I was contacted by the owner of The Farmer's Garden website and thought I would pass it along. It is a place where you can post information about your extra garden produce to give it away to people in your community. It looks like a new website, so it will be interesting to see if it catches on.

It all looks free and is pretty user friendly.

If any of you try it out, let me know how it goes! I posted an ad to get rid of a bunch of kale, but I didn't see any other adds for my area, so I doubt I will see any takers...but who knows.

ali

Garden updates May 30

No pictures today-the neighbors are having a big graduation party and I would feel weird out there taking a bunch of pictures with their guests in the background!

I do have some updates though. On Wednesday I noticed the first tomato fruit setting. I think they were all on the cherry tomato plants. Broccoli heads are the size of a silver dollar and peas are starting to form. The kids picked our first two strawberries this morning.

We are harvesting tons of lettuce. We are also getting a fair amount of spinach, kale, and chard. I think next year I will plant less lettuce and more spinach.

I harvested a large colander overflowing with spinach and decided to blanch, chop, and freeze it for later. It only filled a zip top bag half way, so next time I need to make sure I have two colanders full before I go to the trouble.

Anybody have a better solution for that than zip top baggies? I worry that freezing in containers will leave the top freezer burned and I don't like the texture of canned spinach. I use it mostly in soups, lasagna, spanikopita, or spinach dip.

I found this site for make a shelf stable salt preserved homemade vegetable stock. I think I will give it a try once my carrots and turnips are ready and use up some Egyptian walking onions, which, by the way, are starting to make their topsets if anybody close by wants to stop by and grab a few!

We are having a disappointing year for our fruit trees. I was hoping since some of the trees are starting their third year in our yard, we would see some fruit. We have one peach on the Reliant peach, a handful of blueberries and that is it. See the list on the right to see all the fruit trees we have planted.

Harvest totals 5/20/09

So far we have harvested:
19.5 oz salad greens (lettuce, spinach etc.)
8 oz of asparagus (a bunny has since found the patch and I am wondering if it is even going to survive at this point)
2.5 oz radishes

The peas are lush, but no blossoms yet. The beans are sprouting. The peppers and tomatoes have blossoms, but I think it still might be a little cool at night to actually set fruit. Next week we should have strawberries too!

How is your spring garden harvest so far?

Kids' evening activities and meal plans

Starting this week my daughter, age 7, has softball on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. My son, age 5, has T-ball on Monday and Wednesday evenings. My husband gets home around 5:15 from work which leaves a very short window for a family dinner. This lasts until the end of June. In order to control the chaos a little I am creating the easiest meal plan possible and repeating it every week until we own our evenings again.

My criteria for the meals included:

• food my kids would eat (they need energy for all that baseball!)
• quick and easy to prepare
• easy to clean up since we have to leave for the ball fields soon after dinner
• inexpensive (our grocery store budget is $250/mo. plus $100/month at the farmers markets)
  
• doesn't heat up the house too much
  
• easily supplemented with whatever is ready in the garden that day
• vegetarian ('cause that's how we roll)
  

Here is what I came up with:

Monday: Pasta or couscous with black beans and garden veggies or pasta with tomato sauce
Tuesday: Breakfast for dinner: omelets with veggies, hash browns if I have time, pancakes, fruit etc.
Wednesday: Rice salad (cook the brown rice, mix it with corn) and serve with lettuce, garden veggies, boiled eggs, cheese etc and salad dressing
Thursday: Bean burritos with garden veggies
Friday: Pizza night has been a tradition in this household for years. Last week we added dandelion greens and feta. So good!

This will be our plan for the next 6 weeks or so and hopefully it will keep me from stressing out about dinner or having my husband pick up Jimmy John's on the way home from work. I think at this point a few weeks of culinary boredom is a small price to pay for a little less to worry about on these busy nights. We will save the more adventurous and fun meals for the weekends. I don't know what we will do once our 3 year old starts having his own activities!!