Monday, July 26, 2010

This week in the garden


The beans and peas are plentiful and often.  Abigail and I love eating them fresh from the garden.  I made the trellis for the peas from hemp and birch branches.  I love the sloping angles of it, reminds me of a house roof.  But for next year, I will need to remember to make it taller.  Who knew the peas were going to grow almost five feet high?  (Well, not me obviously!).  Since I didn't have enough pea seeds for the length of both sides of the trellis, I planted lettuce which will be ready for its first cut this week.  With all the hot weather we have had, the shade of the peas has been really helpful.  In Matt's weeding earnest he pulled up the spinach and pepper plants, so I have a few bare spots to plant some more beans.  In his defense, the kids and I started the pepper plants from seed in April and they were probably never going to produce peppers before fall so I am glad for the room.  And the spinach will do better in the cool fall anyway.  Tonight for dinner we had beans and peas from the garden, locally grown tomatoes and garlic, and basil from our herb garden.

With all this crazy hot weather this summer (loving it, not complaining.  I wait through 4 1/2 months of solid snow for this!), the blueberry bushes have all ripend at the same time and overwhelmed us!  We bribed enticed 4 of our students that work for the summer to come help us pick the bushes clean with a reward of blueberry pie.  There were 5-6 of us working for about 3 1/2 hours to get it all done.  In the end we picked about 12 quarts with lots more in people's bellies.  We had a great dinner with every single person contributing to cooking the meal in some way and 2 pies with ice cream for dessert.  I have never had so many people cooking in my house at the same time.  It was a wonderful experience.  There is just something so unifying about preparing food with people.  It was about the best way I could think of to spend a Sunday afternoon.

peace

2 comments:

Riggs said...

Woh, lots of veggies! Think they'll keep if you send them through airmail???? hint hint. Haha....oh, and if you could include one of those blueberry pies, that would be super awesome of you too. Thanks Chef Sara.

Sara said...

I'll see what I can do, Riggs...otherwise you will just have to come up and sample some in person! hint, hint...
peace