In season

Today for lunch I made butternut squash soup using half a squash left over from my Dinner for Henry Pizza. I modified this  healthy recipie, adding milk at the end to add some bulk and thicken it up a little bit- though if you wanted to stay vegan, you certainly could.
After finally figuring out what is what in the garden, I harvested a decent amount of collard greens. I wanted to keep this lunch as healthy as possible and also wanted Mom to eat it (she despises collards with bacon fat) and didn't want to go to the store. So, in big pot, I combined the greens, some prepared salsa, garlic, some onion, about 1 1/2 cups of water and 1/2 cup of apple cider vinegar. Bring to a boil, then let simmer for a while. Next time, I'll add less vinegar. Once the green were limp and tender, I spread some soft herbed cheese on whole wheat toast points and topped with a spoonful of the greens. OMG! so good! The cheese was a good counterpoint to the greens. And the soup balanced the whole thing out.
Norm ate the whole meal! Mom liked the greens, and so did Dad, a born and bred Southerner.

Surprise!

One of the things I love the most about learning how to garden is all the surprises along the way. I've found that often it's the means as well as the end that is meant to be enjoyed. Sometimes these surprises are frustrating- Why did my peas that did so well last spring totally fail to thrive this fall? What the hell is going on with my sweet potatoes? Do I have some sort of potoato whale hybrid that needs two years to gestate? But often the surprises are plesant. Volunteer tomatoes! A canteloupe plant from the compost! Oh boy!
I'm finding that even (especially?) when I do my best to tame and culitvate her, Mother Earth always finds ways to keep me on my toes.
P.S. green beans for dinner on thursday!!! Can't wait!

baby melon.

heliotrope

When I was in high school, my email address contained the word heliotrope, along with an inordinate amount of x's. I thought it was clever; somehow brainy and mysterious but also religous at the same time. A conversation starter-- any plant who follows the sun (or Son). My friend Paul Higgins once riduciled me. He used words like assanine and ridiculous, and more that ten years later, I agree with him. Funny, Paul was an atheist at the time, and if I had to guess which one of my friends would later attend a relgious university and structure our life around the church calendar, Paul would have been last on list. I would have been wrong. Paul is now one of the most faithful people I know, where as I am currently....unaffilated. Ten years is a long time.
All that aside, plants really do follow the sun and my sun flowers have curved stems from trying to stay close to the light.

For your viewing pleasure, pictures of my sunflowers.

In Between

This morning while Avery was out on a walk with my parents and then later napping, I did some gardeny type chores--weeding, compost turning, trimming the greens for my lunch later in the day. I gave every body a late morning drink before the heat of the day sets in-- It may be fall elsewhere but down here in the Land of Eternal Summer the heat index still occasionally hits 100.
Everything is growing so well! The beans and peas have the very beginnings of blossoms; the cabbage typ plants-- collards, broccoli, actual cabbage-- have nice green leaves. The sunflowers have nice strong stems and track the sun through the sky. The ones in the ground are doing better than the ones in the pots, so now I know that. The sweet potatoes, though,  are still an enigma. They've been in the ground for months and keep putting out a vine with healthy leaves, but the actual potatoes aren't anywhere to be found. Next summer, it's a sweet potato tower for sure.
Everything seems to be in between times. Not seedlings, nor fruit producing. Soon, though.

baby

here are some really cute pictures of avery in the garden!

Healthy (ish) oatmeal cookies

in my never ending quest to make yummy food that's also good for me and my baby, i've modified the oatmeal cookie recepie on the back of the canister.

3 cups old fashioned oats
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 t baking soda
1/2 cup almonds (i threw mine in the food processor b/c avery's not so good with nuts, but you can leave them whole if you'd like them chunky)

2 pealed medium mashed peaches
some yogurt (fat free, french vanilla- you could use milk or water if you wanted this to be vegan)
1 egg
1 cup brown sugar.

mix dry ingredients together. then mix wet. mix both together.
i have a baby so I don't have time to do normal cookies, so i pour the batter into a greased baking dish and bake on 350 for like 25 minutes until brown and seem done.

I have also put them in mini-muffin and normal sized muffin pans. Once, I greased the inside of a (clean!) turtle shaped sand toy and baked it on a cookie sheet.

Sometimes I leave them plain on top; sometimes I crumble brown sugar before baking, or spread with cream cheese, or glaze with a melted cream cheese/milk/brown sugar situation.

if you don't have fresh peaches, i'm sure canned would be fine- though i wouldn't use them. Pears would do well. Bananas, apple sauce (canned or just mashed cooked apples) would too. I'd probably also do sweet potatoes or canned pumpkins. You could reduce the sugar too, or try honey, agave, stevia etc. If you go the vegan route, and eliminate the egg, I'd use an egg substitute or increase the baking soda by like a half teaspoon.


these passed the baby test, the dad test, AND the boyfriend who hates veggies test.
happy baking!

recap

So I totally crapped out with the blogging this summer. Here's what happened: no squash, zucchini, or melons; LOTS of lovely peas!; good yummy tomatoes; a lot of okra spread out over a long period of time.
So for the fall: salad greens in pots; sunflowers in pots and in ground; onions, peas, bush beans, collards, cabbage, broccoli, spinach in the bed. I have also planted two black berry bushes. A volunteer tomato plant appeared out of nowhere (well, most likely from either a seed that was in the compost or from the spring plant). My sweet potatoes salvaged out of the compost is flourishing despite being munch on by a bunny and raked by norm. I'm still not sure how to know when they are ready for me to eat them. Next spring I think I might plant some sweet potato towers to make the process easier.