Fresh garden salad

It is perfectly lovely to live smack dab in the city and still be able to go outside and pick our dinner ten minutes before we eat it. That's what I call fresh, not to mention organic as well. 

 A few of our squash were finally ready, as well as some green bush beans. I didn't plant enough beans this year to satisfy our pallets (Lexi LOVES them raw - something I didn't anticipate back in February when planning the garden), but this growing season has been a learning curve enough as it is!

 These are Thumbelina carrots. I'm sure you can guess why. They are super cute, and I ordered the seeds with Lexi's excited voice in mind ("LOOK MAMA, BABY CARROTS!!!!"). The voice IS cute, as imagined, but somehow pulling these out from the earth with their enormous leafy tops leaves you wishing for a little more bang for your buck. In other words, more carrot. On the upside, they taste delicious. All two bites of it. :-)

 We are eating everything from our garden raw right now. Eric isn't ever thrilled about cooked or steamed veg anyway, so everything gets chopped up and thrown into the dinner salad. Here we have the carrots, beans, squash, and zucchini tossed with our Bright lights Swiss chard and Red Russian kale. Sprinkle on a little balsamic vinegar mixed with honey, add a side of fresh bread smeared with goat cheese and voila! Supper. Fresh, fast, and super delish.

I am happy when my hands are dirty

I am amazed by seeds.

A tiny insignificant little speck, becomes this. With the right amount of water, soil, and light. 

Normally, any plants that I am responsible for die within a few weeks of being in my care. Except for geraniums, for some odd reason. (I have had these crazy geraniums for five years now and I can't tell you how many times they have resurrected themselves from a sure death of neglect).

My garden, at the moment, is thriving. I have a feeling I was supposed to thin these plants out a little more than I did, but they seem ok at the moment. That's the beauty of this year being an experiment. I have no idea what I'm doing, so it's perfectly fine to make mistakes! At least they are edible mistakes!

This bed is a mix of lettuces, spinach, kale, arugula, tomatoes, eggplant, cilantro, carrots, and bush beans. Everything is doing well so far. I was a little leery of planting all these items in the same bed, but the research I did said it should work. We will know better by late June/July when the plants are much larger.

This cilantro is so flavorful! We eat a LOT of cilantro over here, and I don't think I have ever had any quite so good.

My husband, a sometimes salad person, LOVES my spinach. Honestly, it is delicious. I sometimes have a hard time with spinach unless it's in a smoothie, but I didn't even need salad dressing! Sweet and savory.

The bare looking spots in this bed are where slower growing plants are, such as carrots and eggplant. In a month this will probably be unrecognizable. The cage tops we built to keep out our crazy squirrels tilt off fairly easily. They also keep little baby fingers out of the greens as well. ;-)

Greens for salad every night, fresh from the garden.

The funniest thing about all of this is that 100 years or so ago, gardening was essential. All the common folk HAD to grow their own food. Either that or they starved. Now, growing your own food is almost a luxury, and has become more of a hobby than a way of life. With all of the processing and fertilizing and everything that is changing the food in our grocery stores these days, I count myself blessed to be able to have land in the city that I can grow food on and feed my family with. 

Even for someone who doesn't have any land, it is still possible to grow food indoors with the right amounts of light, or in a pot on a deck or windowsill! (We will be exploring this concept more once winter hits.) So grab a pot, or dig up that lonely patch of soil, and plant some future food! 

Happy gardening!