Sunday, August 25, 2013

Garden Salad



This summer has gone by so fast! Since we decided that we would not be selling our home and heading out in a school bus to travel around the USA this year, I committed myself to focusing on our home and garden. My goal is to create exactly what I would want in the "perfect" house and yard. Then, if and when we are actually in a position to head out on the road, I can decide if I want to sell the house, considering all of the work that has gone into it. Either we will keep it and grow old here, content with all of the changes we have made or sell it for a bit more money than we could have this year. Either way, it will be a win for us! In the backyard, which I am really excited to share with everyone....soon....I have been working on increasing our garden space and incorporating as many perennial herbs as we can into the landscape. I have also decided to share all of my crazy projects, beginning with the bookshelves I have been working on (or procrastinating on) since March.

This year has been really good for tomatoes and peppers. I finally had to threaten some of the kids to get them to stop eating the tomatoes (they think they are candy, especially little Sunshine. We even gave him his own cherry tomato plant for his birthday, thinking it would help preserve all of the other 7 tomato plants...silly us). I finally had enough tomatoes today to make garden salads for the entire family. This year, we stuck with heirlooms and really enjoyed the rainbow of colors!




 
 
We took the tomatoes, peppers, mesclun greens, Swiss chard, nasturtium (leaves and flowers), zucchini, cucumber, and a beet (they weren't ready yet, so we used that beet and it's greens and will hopefully be able to harvest the rest of the beets soon) from our garden and chopped them all up. We added some boiled, organic, free-range eggs from our chickens who are laying now (Yay! More on the chickens in another post), organic carrots (ours are still pretty small), avocados (wish we could grow these here) , mushrooms (I am going to attempt mushrooms next year), green onions (birds ate all of my onion starts this year....little stinkers!), bacon, and some of Annie's yummy Italian dressing (although it has been decided that the Shiitake Mushroom is our favorite so far).
 


 It is so wonderful to finally enjoy a garden salad that I can say came from our own garden, organic, GMO-free, and nurtured with lots and lots of L-O-V-E. Hope everyone is enjoying the fruits of their labors and getting excited for planting fall produce. I know I am! ;)

~.~ the purple sprout