A Backyard Caprese Salad

{A Caprese salad made with local mozzarella and tomatoes and basil from my garden}

Ever since I discovered a local source of mozzarella cheese --via the Blue Ridge Dairy of Sterling, VA-- I've been looking forward to having a Caprese salad with tomatoes and basil from my own garden. I was able to do this just a few days ago for my Southern SOLE Food Local Meal Challenge of the week.

The first few tomatoes in my garden ripened last week. I harvested these two Ace55 hybrids...

...and just a handful of Chocolate Cherries. I know it's such a cliche to be a gardener who loves tomatoes, but this is why I started a garden in the first place, to grow my own tomatoes. I get so excited when I see the first tomatoes of the season!

The basil plants are growing in the same huge container with my Mortgage Lifter. To say that this Caprese salad was delicious and fresh just doesn't do it justice.  It was so perfect that I ate half the plate without adding salt, pepper, or olive oil, and I didn't miss or need those ingredients. I did add them to another serving, and I must admit, I wish I hadn't. That's the beauty of using fresh and local ingredients--often you don't need to season food as much or at all.

I think this was supposed to be Fruit Week with my SSFC participants, but I just had to showcase my Caprese salad first. I'll post about my local fruit dish next week. I'm looking forward to more tomatoes and Caprese salads for the rest of summer.

Working for the Weekend

hostas 4-14-12, originally uploaded by Bumble Lush.

I'm sooooo glad it's the weekend. Work has been busy and frustrating lately, and I can't wait for this project to be finished (4 more weeks!)

These are a few odds and ends around my garden.

First, my second hosta is making a comeback. You can sort of see the shoots on the right of the photo above. I'm not sure why one sprouted so much faster than the other. That's never happened before. I was worried that the one on the right wasn't going to come back, but I'm glad it did. Although they're somewhat plain, I do love these plants.



I have a volunteer parsley plant! It looks great too. It appeared in our small yard patch where we're growing onions. Something bad happened to my container parsley, so I'm happy to see some in the garden.




Remember the saga with the pepper plants I tried to over winter? Only two survived--a jalapeno plant and a golden bell pepper plant.




The jalapeno plant already has a fruit. I'm sad we lost so many pepper plants to aphids, but we have a lot of pepper seedlings going so I'm hoping to replenish our pepper crops this summer.

I'm off to Baltimore this weekend to hang out with a couple of college girlfriends. Have a great weekend!

Weekly Garden Update

Weekly Garden Update 4/18/10 - Since my post 3 days ago for GBBD, the purple azaleas have started to appear. The white ones are not open yet, but I suspect by the end of the week they'll be in full bloom.

the purple azalea next to the pink one is also starting to bloom

The temperature this past week has been in the mid 60s/low 70s with evening temps below 55. For this reason we brought many of the seedlings inside rather than leave them outside with a cover. We put them in the office and created a bit of a greenhouse effect. We opened the shades so they could get plenty of sunshine and kept the soil moist, but we closed the door to trap the warmth and humidity inside the room. It really helped the seedlings grow. Check out the red sunflower seedlings! They're a rich reddish/purple wine color (the variety is called Chianti). I can't wait to see how the flowers look!

The oregano seedlings have sprouted.

We've got a strawberry! And there are a few more flowers so more strawberries should be coming soon.

In the backyard -- My hostas have exploded! I wish I had taken a picture last week for comparison when they looked like little green toothpicks poking out of the soil. I planted these last year, and they completely disappeared over the winter. They are perennials, so I was expecting them to come back this spring, but I didn't expect them to go from little sticks to full grown leaves within 5 days!

 variety: Halcyon

As for the garden animals--this is our little ant sculpture... :)

...and the fish are doing well. Sadly only 4 of the 5 survived the winter, but the rest look healthy. And the frog came back! We saw him a few days ago.

2010 Veggie Crop

This year's planned veggie crop:
zucchini - from seed
yellow squash - from seed
tomatoes (including cherry and yellow grape) - some plants, trying cherry tomatoes from seed
bell peppers - will probably buy plants
green beans - from seed
cucumbers - from seed

Although we are planting the majority from seed, we also bought some plants to get a head start. These are the tomato plants (regular tomatoes--Early Girl and Better Boy for slicing/sauces; cherry; & yellow grape):

We're also growing green beans, yellow squash, and zucchini from seed:

one of these is also oregano

We're going to grow more vegetables from seed, but we'll plant them later. We also bought plants for our herb garden today:

We love Italian herbs, and in addition to the oregano seeds we planted, we also bought an oregano plant. We plan on having gallons of homemade spaghetti sauce in the freezer to get us through next winter.

We also bought spearmint, basil, and thyme plants. Last year my spearamint plant mysteriously turned brown over night and just died. Not sure what happened, and I'm hoping it doesn't happen again. This is also the first year we're trying to grow thyme.

spearamint

basil

thyme

Finally, check out this angry little peppermint plant. I planted this last year, and not only did it survive the harsh winter (3 blizzards!!!), it has come back strong. It smells soooo good....

Can't wait to try the mint in some dishes.

Spring has sprung!

blueberry bushes - buds have sprouted!

butterfly bush - trimmed back and ready to grow

parsley April 2009

parsley March 2010

Spring is officially here, not that you can tell by the cold temeperatures. Right on time, buds and leaves started sprouting around the 21st. The blueberry bushes we planted last summer have started to sprout buds. We need to put a net over them to protect the fruit from the birds, which ate most of the berries on one bush within hours of planting it last year.

The first herb I ever tried to grow from seed was parsley. The first picture of the parsley was taken in April 2009, almost a year ago. It grew to about 3x that size. Then the 3 blizzards and other minor snow storms all but destroyed it, and what you see in the last pic is what it looks like today. The parsley was started from seed, we'll see if makes it through another spring!

Now to order some seeds & plants and plan my 2010 garden...

More vegetables

 

yellow squash

 

zuke squash blossom

 

herbs

green beans (and basil on the right)

 

A bountiful harvest!

An earlier post showed lots of pictures of the tomatoes and peppers we planted.  This one is a tribute to the other things--zucchini, yellow squash, green beans and herbs.