The Garden Post

Here's what our garden looked like on May 24th of this year:

Here's what our garden looked like on May 31st!  Yea, it's getting roto-tilled!

Here's what our garden looked like on June 10th, not long after I planted it:

Now we can fast forward a couple months to the end of July.  Here's what we saw a lot of:

It's the longest wait in the world, waiting for those tomatoes to turn red!  But the wait is finally over, and we are now foundering on tomatoes at our house!  This is what the kitchen cabinet looked like last Monday nite:

We finally ate & gave away most of these, now this is what it looks like right now:

Last Sunday, I made gazpacho, using an Alton Brown recipe from foodnetwork.com.

It was AWESOME!  Sorry, no picture.  But I will make this again!

The other night I made bruschetta chicken - I posted about how good this was a couple years ago.

We also bought a loaf of artisan bread and have had bruschetta with that a couple of times.

Some of our other favorite seasonal things to have with our bounty of tomatoes are:  BLT sandwiches, and fresh salsa.  Terrell is in the kitchen as I do this post, making salsa.  He is the self-appointed salsa maker of the family.  He tells me this batch will be chunky, that's good, because I don't care for his salsa that is practically puree.

Last Monday nite we took a couple of sacks of tomatoes over to a lady who just moved into our ward with her 7 kids.  She was overjoyed to get them, and said the first thing she was going to have was cottage cheese & tomatoes.  That reminded me how much I love warm tomatoes fresh from the garden, heaped with cottage cheese.  So I had to come home and have some myself!  I've enjoyed this tasty treat several times this week.

Another fun thing in our garden this year has been our sunflowers.  I planted a row of them along the fence at the back of the garden.  They are now in full bloom, and they are TALL!

Here's Terrell with the Grands, out in the garden Thursday morning:

This next picture really gives you an idea of how tall everything has grown this year.  Must be that turkey manure (Nutra-mulch) that we added to the soil before roto-tilling.

Here I am with two of my favorite little people

Next, I walked around the block with Cailyn & Gavin and took a picture of our garden from a different view:

Our back fence is 6 feet tall, so it gives you an idea how massive the sunflowers are!

I did get to grow something else in my garden this year that has been fun to watch:

OKRA!  I've only tried to grow it once before, and that year all I got was one lowly pod.  This year I have been much more successful. I really don't know what to do with it, other than saute it in a pan.  My favorite okra dish is the okra side dish you can get at Cracker Barrel!  YUM!  If you have any great okra recipes, let me know.