Happy (future) Meals

This past week we checked on the progress our seeds and seedlings have made. Wanna see?

Ah, our avocados. Much beloved by us and our friends and family.
We cannot possibly eat the hundreds of avocados we get per season, so we share them as much as we can. When my boys were starting out on solid foods, they enjoyed a mashed-up avocado for breakfast every day, and love them still!

Last year we tried growing bell peppers for the first time and it was a success.
We look forward to slicing up these guys in fajitas, or saute them in stir-fries, yum yum!

This is our first try with carrots – you start them from seed, and we have them in this one pot and several other little ones.
Many of these will go into smoothies – grow, little carrots, grow!

Our onions can’t be stopped. The green ones grew through winter, and now we’ve planted more of the white and yellow varieties.
I see some veggie trading in our future.

We jumped into the potato-growing bandwagon and chose basic russet and Yukon gold varieties.
If these are a success I will definitely get adventurous and order some mail order potato goodness next year!

My husband hacked up a pumpkin from last Halloween and planted some of the seeds.
Maybe we’ll have a few little scary ‘kins this year!

Look! My roses are starting to bloom again!
I love yellow roses and my husband bought this plant for me, so happy to see it’s doing so well.

We’ve planted a ton of squash – zucchini, summer squash, crookneck, etc.
Zucchini chocolate chip cookies are in our future!

The boys’ favorite thing to do in summer days is to go out and look for strawberries ready to be picked.
We also have blueberries and grapes growing in our yard.

I hope you’ve enjoyed looking at our growing fruits and veggies – while I am NOT looking forward to the high temperatures of summer, I most definitely AM looking forward to enjoying the bounty of our plantings. Big thanks to my husband who did most of the work, including building raised beds and getting me plants he knows I love!

What’s been planted

Most of the veggie garden has been planted. We managed to get most of the plants in the ground in between bouts of rain. And when I say “we” I mean my husband.
Out lovely swiss chard, I saute it like spinach, with butter and garlic, and I have a recipe I want to try – a white bean soup with chard. We’ll see how it turns out.

This is what I call Onion Hill, there are yellow onions growing (I hope) in between the two patches of green onions.
These green onions are legendary in our house. You can grab a bunch and put them in a bowl in one corner of the kitchen and you can smell them from the other corner. Fragrant and flavorful, these have grown all through the winter for us.

Our peas and beans, my husband made a little structure for them to climb:
My picky 6-year-old who won’t touch anything green will happily pick them off the vine and pop them in his mouth.

Squash Row – we have grown baseball bat zucchinis in our garden, although I will be more diligent about harvesting when they’re smaller, because they’re much yummier then.
I have a feeling lots of zucchini bread and zucchini chocolate chip cookies (kids love them!) are in our future.

We’ll also be doing tomatoes, of course, I hope to do some canning this year as well as drying some with my awesome new food dehydrator. The grapes and blueberries are also planted, and the corn has a reserved spot as well. Thanks to my husband for all his work on “my” veggie garden 😀

Are you planting any fruits or veggies this year?