The earth has been good to us this season. Our raised garden beds have been a great success, we went blueberry picking, and our yard has had enough flowers to spare some for indoor arrangements.
So far this year the garden has produced more lettuce than we could eat, a steady serving of peas, and some small but spicy carrots. Apparently if you plant carrots next to peppers, they come out a little peppery. Interesting. Not bad, but also kind of strange to taste.
The tomatoes are green but will be ready soon, and our pepper plants are looking very promising. We have a few green peppers already.
The carrots have been in the ground a long time, and I would have hoped that they would be much bigger by now, but the soil probably isn’t loose enough. We have many more to harvest. I made some pesto out of the greens because the foliage is much more substantial than the root. To make a carrot-green pesto, just replace the basil with carrot greens in any old pesto recipe. It worked quite well and almost tastes the same. A food processor is very helpful to have.
In early August we took an afternoon ride to the hill towns to go blueberry picking. The bushes were overflowing and we picked six pints.
The best part was that we got to bring Tovi. She had a blast running around the blueberry rows eating grass and a few berries off the ground. I baked mini blueberry pies and some blueberry oatmeal cookies and still froze two pints.
Aside from the edible plants, the garden has been producing a whole bunch of these pretty purple wildflowers. I liked them so much that I cut a few for the table. I have no idea what they are.
My yard still has spatterings of random wildflowers that I need to consolidate. These black-eyed susans are from some of the solitary plants that popped up in the wrong spot. Slowly I’m collecting my BES’s into one location, trying to make a large bushel of them for next year. For now, they look very nice on my counter.
