See that? That, my friends, is food from my garden. Lovingly cradled in my shirt, because I am unorganized and didn’t have a basket or anything, and it was going starting to rain, so I didn’t want to go back inside to find one.
Last night I made supper, and everything green in it (swiss chard, green beans, peas, rosemary, thyme) came directly out of my garden. It was terribly thrilling–I got home from work, went over to the garden, picked a bunch of stuff, and then went inside and cooked it. There were tiny, adorable green beans and sweet, tender peas!
Also, it turns out that swiss chard, which I’d never had before, is delicious. I can’t believe that no one told me about it sooner! It’s like the lovechild of spinach, lettuce, and delicious grass. Which sounds weird, I guess, since I don’t spend a lot of time eating grass, but whatever–this was fantastic.
Supper, for those of you who are into this sort of thing, was pretty fantastic. Chicken breasts sliced thin and dredged in seasoned flour, then cooked in olive oil. I also sauteed sweet onion, garlic, mushrooms, and swiss chard, and steamed the peas and green beans. We made a sauce of white wine, olive oil, capers, lemon juice, and rosemary and thyme from the garden, and then dumped it all over pasta. It was amazing.
We had a surprisingly good night tonight, too. We took Maura to McDonalds to let her play on the playground for a while, but left after about an hour. We got home to find that the threat of rain had passed, and it was cool and cloudy, but not raining, so M played with the neighbor kids for about two hours while Nick and I had cigars.
Given the amazing success of supper last night, we also trekked into the backyard and started to plan the garden for next year. So far, my plan is to roughly triple the garden of this year, plus put in a few rows of berries. I suspect that I’m aiming excessively high, but in the meantime, I’ve made a graph! I have color-coded squares and everything. I’ll probably post it at some point to see what you guys think, because god forbid that I decide anything without first consulting the internet.
In other garden news, about a quarter of my tomato plants have baby tomatoes on them, and probably half of the other ones have flowers that will soon (I hope) become tomatoes. My friend Livia feels that I have about ten tomato plants too many, and I’m aiming to prove her wrong. I’m counting down to delicious, ripe tomatoes.
Color-codedness makes everything better!
I will have to look at my mom’s tomatoes next time I go over there, which should, I suppose, be tomorrow.
You can never have too many tomato plants because something will always happen to some of them. And if by some miracle you do get too many, you can always whiz them in a blender and freeze them to use during winter.