Small Flowers

First, a sincere Thank You to everyone who left kind words of encouragement on my Kitchen Garden post, both in the comments section and elsewhere. I know that making mistakes helps you learn, but for some reason, garden mistakes seem so final, maybe because they sometimes involve the words "dead" or "rot."  Sometimes it's also because I'm not sure what I did wrong--was it something out of my control, like weather or bugs I didn't catch in time? Or is it something I did? I certainly appreciate my new-found garden blogging community, not only for the encouragement but for your garden tips and experience as well!

In my garden, I'm still tracking and mystified by the sunflowers' blooms. Not only did they bloom late, but they're also much smaller than last year. Above is the second set of coconut ice sunflower blooms, much smaller than the first set.

Once again, this year's Chianti hybrids look smaller than last year's and not as dark red either. These pictures are of a new set of blooms that has developed over the last week or so. So what was it that made them smaller this year, weather? Soil? The seeds? We'll try again next year and see what that batch looks like.

Non-Earthquake Wednesday and Tomatoes

No damage to the Bumble Lush home or garden after yesterday's earthquake. We were very fortunate. Were you in the quake zone? Was this your first earthquake? It was my second and felt more like a tremor to me (because there was no damage). If you were in the affected areas, I hope that your families are safe and property is fine.

Non sequitur: I had these tomato pictures scheduled for my Wordless Wednesday post:

top to bottom: Black Krim harvest; variety of tomatoes and tomatillos; grape tomatoes of different sizes; and a grape tomato and patio princess harvest

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.