Eat - Grow - Harvest

Grow, Harvest, Eat

July 15, 2013

Happy Monday, everyone!

The garden is officially starting to explode!  With so many (very) hot days, followed by a few days of light drizzles and a few heavy downpours (finally!), the garden is happy, beginning to produce and filling in very nicely! While harvests are still pretty sporadic and small, the diversity in the garden is starting to show itself on our plates.  What more could we ask for?  Well, how about enough to preserve!?  We’re not there yet, but the bounty will come soon enough, and we are truly happy with where the garden is at right now.

In other news, the newest Newbies are beginning to lay!  We’ve found an itty bitty egg in a nesting box and a couple little eggs in the run.  They’re obviously confused and trying to figure it out, but the point is, they’re doing it!  This is very exciting since our older hens are definitely slowing way down in the laying department and our five Newbies can now pick up the slack!

Grow

Patty Pan Squash

Flowering potatoes

Itty bitty Lemon Cucumber flowers

Our transplanted sweet potato vine is doing well!

Teeny tiny Tomatillo lantern

Luffa flower!  See that little luffa growing at
the base of the flower? So cool!!!

Trio Color Bush Beans
Basil, basil and more basil!

Harvest

Harvest totals for the week:

  • Beans (Bush) – 2 oz
  • Kale – 3 oz
  • Peppers 
    • Jalapeno – 2 oz
    • Shishito – 6 oz
  • Squash (Patty Pan) – 10 oz
  • Tomato 
    • Black from Tula – 3 oz
    • Roma – 1 oz
    • Yellow Taxi – 2 oz 
  • Eggs – 139

Eat – Meal Plan (7/13/13 thru 7/26/13)

Oh man…the last two weeks were a disaster in relation to following through with our meal plan and not eating out!  Chalk it up to exhaustion, stress and just plain old laziness, but we ate out a lot over the last two weeks.  So, in an effort to eat the food that was purchased for our last meal plan, several of the meals below are from the last plan and are noted by the double asterisk (**).

I’d also like to introduce you to our Fend For Yourself dinners.  Let me explain a little – See, Tool Lady and I don’t always want to eat the same things all the time.  Some nights our tastes are just different, some nights there are just too many leftovers that need to be eaten.  Whatever the reason, we will regularly chat about our dinner options, shrug our shoulders and say, “Fend For Yourself night?”.  So, since we do it regularly, I figured I might as well throw it in the mix and let you  know about it here 😉

Breakfast
Cereal with frozen berries
Oatmeal with raisins
Protein (& berry) Shakes
Warm & Nutty Cinnamon Quinoa

Lunch*
**Pasta salad w/ tuna
**Egg Salad Sandwiches

Snacks
**Deviled Eggs
Sliced Jicama with lime and red chile
Broccoli Cheddar Jalapeno Fritters

Dinner
Sloppy Joe’s with corn on the cob
Frito Pies
**Tuna Patties with Green Beans*
Feta Artichoke Pasta Salad
**Pasta w/ meat sauce*
**Mac & Cheese (w/ tuna or ground beef)
Bean Burritos
**Spanikopita*
**Green Chile Chicken Enchiladas*
Ground Beef Tacos
Breakfast For Dinner (eggs, french toast, turkey bacon)
**Build Your Own Pizza*

*dinner leftovers will be eaten for lunch the next day

What are you growing, harvesting, planning and eating in your neck of the woods?  Please share your stories and links in the comments below!
xoxo,
M
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27 Comments on “Grow, Harvest, Eat”

  1. I have never heard of some of those plants. (Patty pan squash)
    Nice Harvest 🙂

    We only have what I am calling a salsa garden this year. Tomatoes and Different peppers. Our first year with raised beds.

    Your garden looks great.
    Thanks for sharing with the HomeAcre Hop! Hope to see you again this Thursday!
    Sandra
    http://www.mittenstatesheepandwool.com

    1. Hi Sandra! Thanks for popping over! This is our first year successfully growing Patty Pans and I just love them! they’re pretty tasty (as squash goes) and they’re just so darned cute! Love their little scalloped edges 🙂 Congrats on your salsa garden! Every garden is a great garden!

  2. Thanks for sharing your garden’s progress on Tuesday Greens!

  3. I successfully grew luffa a couple of years ago, could not get them to survive our brutal summer last year. I’m pretty excited to have a couple of healthy vines this year and they have begun to flower – so excited. Thanks for taking us on a tour of your beautiful garden. (visiting from the HomeAcre Hop)

    ~Taylor-Made Ranch~
    Wolfe City, Texas

    1. Thank you! We’re trying to incorporate more of what we harvest into our meal plans. It’s a work in progress, but it is getting easier 🙂

  5. Those blue potato flowers are amazing! I guess I never considered that different colored potatoes have different flowers although I’ve seen both white and light pink flowers in my own garden…

    1. I hadn’t thought of the different colored flowers for different varieties until I started growing them! Such a cool little detail, right?

  6. Thanks for sharing your garden harvest photos. That’s been one of the fun things about visiting many of the MPM participants.
    I hope you have a wonderful and delicious week.

  7. Thanks for sharing your garden harvest photos. That’s been one of the fun things about visiting many of the MPM participants.
    I hope you have a wonderful and delicious week.

  8. Thanks for sharing your garden harvest photos. That’s been one of the fun things about visiting many of the MPM participants.
    I hope you have a wonderful and delicious week.

  10. You certainly do a lot in a not very big place. We have solved the eating out problem when we moved here permanently – we are a 30 minute drive to the closest greasy spoon. Being in zone 5, our zucchini are just starting and all tomatoes are still green. The pole beans are blooming and are about 7 feet tall.
    I like the texture of your luffa flower. It is beautiful. I grew luffa years ago but had forgotten about the flower.

    1. This is the first year we have been successful at growing a fairly healthy luffa vine, so the flowers are brand new to us…and therefore completely gorgeous in our eyes 😉

  11. Great looking harvest this week. Our summer garden is just starting to really get going. We had our first harvest this week but we will be another 30 days or so before we really start getting the big numbers.

  12. Oh I love those green eggs. Have I already said that before? 😉 Looks very nice. Rain does the garden so much good! Those potato flowers look so pretty. Mine are mostly gone now, I have been digging them up here and there. The the plants looked so pretty there for a while. My flowers were white and purple though.

  13. Oh how I love patty pan squash.. yours looks lovely. And that sweet potato vine looks super healthy, mine have tiny leaves compared to yours. I have never had my potatoes flower and now I’m wondering why?

    1. Flowering is a sign that your potatoes are close to ready to harvest…which reminds me…I should go out and pinch off those flowers so as to encourage further tuber development 😉

  14. The menus around here are just based on whatever is coming out of the garden, so it’s been zucchini, zucchini, zucchini…. I had zucchini for breakfast today. Your hens seem to be incredibly productive, what do you do with all the eggs?

    1. Mmmm….zucchini…

      To answer your question, we eat some eggs, give some to family and neighbors and then sell the rest. We have a couple of co-workers and acquaintances that purchase eggs each week…we usually sell about 4 dozen a week which helps offset our feed costs 🙂

  16. The garden (and the new hens) are looking promising. I like all those Shishito peppers. I’m with you on the meal planning. Look in the fridge stuffed full of bags of produce from the garden, say heck with it, it’s too dang hot, fend for yourself or get take-out. And why aren’t you eating eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner?

    1. Lol…we really *could* eat eggs all the darn time, but that would just be boring 😉 I mean, really, how many different ways can you really cook an egg?

  17. Lovely! Our garden is looking much the same but I don’t have that lovely squash like you do! I am hoping to can the harvest this year as well, we haven’t had enough yet to do that.

  18. So jealous of those eggs! And the garden bounty looks lovely with all those pretty flowers.

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