Celebrating Mom with treats from the garden

Last night we invited my Mom over for dinner to celebrate her birthday. I tried to use everything I could that was in season in the garden: kale, herbs, English peas, snow peas, lettuce, arugula, potatoes.


Home Grown Ingredients


The start of dinner


Yellow Tomato Gazpacho spiced with garden chilis
(frozen from last year) with cilantro oil and chives



Herb Roasted New Potato Salad on Garden Greens
(check out the little BB potato at the bottom
of the plate!)



Pan Seared Salmon with Honey Rum Berry
Sauce and Garden Kale

We finished with Rhubarb Crisp with Ice Cream (too dark outside to take pictures by then!).
The rhubarb wasn't from the garden --- our plant is in its first year and can't be harvested. Hopefully next year!

Volunteers everywhere!

This has been the first time I've gardened for two consecutive years in the same place. After spending time carefully planning this year's garden, imagine my surprise to discover several "volunteer" plants from last year that were springing up all over the place - never mind my carefully constructed garden plan!

I think the volunteers are terrific and don't have the heart to kill them. The garden is playing an active role in designing itself this year! These pictures were taken around the 3rd week of June.

The garden

Although I try to maximize garden space, even I

wouldn't intentionally plant lettuce between bricks.

The bed on the right has the potatoes I actually

planted this year. What you see in the center bed

is all volunteers (I guess I was too lazy to dig up the

potatoes last year!)

This was meant to be an herb garden, but it

looks like it's going to be a volunteer tomato patch.

Volunteer tomatoes