Monday, August 22, 2011

My Kitchen Garden

Before I owned a home, I would watch hours of HGTV, dreaming of the kitchen, bath, and landscaping projects I would do once I became a home-owner. (Now that I am one, I am painfully aware of the time and money that interior and exterior decorating costs). I remember an episode of an early morning garden program that featured a woman going out to her backyard kitchen garden to decide what to eat for dinner. She picked a few herbs, an eggplant, and some other vegetables and put them into a cute little basket. I thought, "That's what I want! I want to go out into my backyard and pick fresh food for my dinner. (And I want a cute basket too.)"

I forgot all about that until one recent weekend afternoon. I was standing in my kitchen, wondering what to eat, when I decided to make an easy chickpea salad using some vegetables I had recently harvested. That's when it dawned on me that my little container garden is developing into a kitchen garden.

It is nothing like what I saw on TV that day, or what I see on websites featuring people's expansive vegetable patches with many different vegetable varieties. My garden is small and still needs a lot of work and organization. We don't have a lot of yard space for gardening, so almost everything is growing in containers, which has positives and negatives. But we grow enough for the two of us to have regular meals with fresh veggies, and we freeze the extras and/or give them to friends. We no longer "just grow" yellow squash, tomatoes, and bell peppers. We're now trying new varieities of these, as well as beans, cucumbers, luffa. Eventually I think we'll be more creative in the kitchen when it comes to meals. I think we've come a long way from the first summer when we didn't know what the heck we were doing and just wanted to grow a few tomatoes and peppers to see if we could do it.

I took a few pictures of recent meals we've had with freshly-picked vegetables. It's nice to have them on hand to throw in a pasta dish for a quick and easy dinner when it's late and you don't feel like cooking anything too complicated. We added steamed broccoli and squash to this pasta, and tossed it with olive oil, pepper, and fresh tomatoes. It was a refreshing meal on a hot summer night. (Glass of wine is often very necessary).

This was my quick and easy chickpea salad: I drained a can of chickpeas and cut up some fresh-picked orange, yellow, and green bell peppers. (Technically that green one didn't get picked. It was knocked off by fierce winds). I picked some parsley and diced up a cup of Tiny Tim tomatoes, tossed everything with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and voila, a super fast cold salad was on my plate.

Although I have a long way to go before I truly consider myself a "gardener," I am really happy with the new skills I'm learning from gardening and preserving food. I don't think we grow enough to can anything, but we do freeze some vegetables and make soups and tons of yummy tomato sauce to freeze too. This year we're learning to save seeds from our favorite and best vegetable plants.

I'm also happy to know exactly where my vegetables are coming from, how they were grown, and the taste...no tomato I've ever bought from the grocery store compares to one picked right off the vine. I hope one day to have a vegetable garden in the ground and not only in containers. I would love to grow potatoes and melons. I'd love to have a little greenhouse so I can have tomatoes all year long. I still need to find a cute basket. In the meantime, I'm very happy to have fresh vegetables right outside my door.

11 comments:

  1. For a small garden, you certainly are harvesting quite a lot. The dishes look and sound so yummy. And I hope your dreams continue to come true...seems like most of them have...

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  2. You asked about my rosemary. I've probably had it ten years or more. Every now and then I start some new pieces. It is evergreen here.

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  3. Sounds like all you need is the cute basket! I agree that harvesting your own makes the dinner much more special. And tasty. Your vegetables look great!

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  4. Yummy! Isn't it a great feeling to just run out your door and pick what you need?

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  5. I certainly think you are really a "gardener." Those tomatoes look great!

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  6. Yum--looks terribly tasty! Good thing I just ate dinner! I'll keep this in mind for tomorrow's dinner, though!

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  7. Your chickpea and tomato salad looks delicious.

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  8. Thanks for the sweet comments, everyone. I think I'll feel more gardener-esque when I stop making careless mistakes. :)

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  9. The pasta dish looks scrumptious! Homegrown veggies are always best. You are a gardener - you don't need acres. Your vegetable pot garden looks very successful to me!

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  10. Dear Bumble Lush, You are a real gardener, you know! The wonderful meals you prepare from your garden are testimony. P. x

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  11. Yum! Don't fool your self into thinking you're not a gardener because you are!! Your container farm is proof!!

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