Peppers, Peppers Everywhere!

I guess I did something right this year with my green pepper plants. Fortunately, we do love green peppers, so all is good. I use it in salads and for my no lettuce salads and they are good stir fried or stuffed.

I had the last of our garden tomatoes in this salad mix I made a few days ago. I do have a few more green tomatoes in the window to ripen, but I am not sure if they will ripen up for me.

The pepper plants grew extremely tall this year, we had a good amount last year too, but not near as many as this year. I guess the soil is very fertile.

 There still are plenty of flowers blooming and lots of little peppers too. If the temperatures drop too low, I'll pull up the plants then. I read that if the temps stay below 60 degrees the peppers will stop ripening.

Dirt for the garden

We worked on cleaning up the garden for the Fall. I plan on planting some cold season crops this year, so I wanted to make sure I had enough soil in the garden. I have 13 raised beds in the garden now and even though they all have soil in them, not all of the soil is very good and all the raised beds are not completely full. 

Anyway to make a long story short, we purchased some Gardeners Choice dirt from a landscaping company near us. They will load it into your truck for you. We ordered one cubic yard for around $36 which is a pickup truck load for us.

A view from the inside of the truck as the dirt is being dumped.

It took the two of us quite awhile to unload all the dirt.

The best tools were two shovels and a wheel barrel.

The soil is called Gardener's Choice since it is a screened topsoil with organic compost, manure compost and organic sand blended together with a topsoil shredder. This soil worked the best for us last year and the vegetables planted in the beds with this soil did very well. We also purchased soil from another company last year that hardened like the clay soil her in NC, so the raised beds with that soil did not do as well. We're working to amend those soils with better soil, mulch and cover crops. We learned our lesson to buy the right soil the first time. This new soil definitely has the manure in it, you can smell it.

We'll be getting one more load of soil to complete the garden beds. After this year I am hoping that we'll be able to keep up with our soil needs with our own compost bins of vegetable scraps, mowed grass, shredded leaves and chicken poop. It is for sure a work in process.

Growing Strawberries

I have tried to grow strawberries over the years with a lot of trouble. I bought some strawberry roots one year and nothing ever grew, I sowed some strawberry seeds and nothing grew. Last year I bought one strawberry plant and I had a few strawberries from it, but mostly some animal came and ate them before I got to them. 

So this year I bought a few strawberry plants and set them in one of my raised garden beds. They shared the space with some bush beans. They did well this year. It also helps to read about each vegetable or fruit that you want to grow so you really know what you're doing.

There were quite a few strawberries on the plants and they were really sweet although small.

At first it produced really small strawberries, but they did get a little bigger then this later on.

Even last week I was still seeing more strawberries and flowers and it is October now.

Here is my biggest harvest of strawberries, not much for 3 plants, but the best crop of strawberries I've ever had so far. I guess any progress is a good thing.

I learned that strawberries will come back each year and that you should have a dedicated space in your garden for them. So now they have taken over one of my garden beds. I plan to add more to the other side of the garden bed this year as well. They are a fairly easy fruit to grow. I have also learned that bird netting over the top of the garden bed is necessary unless you want to share your strawberries with all the furry and feathered creatures around your yard. In my case, my chickens love the strawberries and I have to pick them after they are locked in their coop for the night or they will steal them from me.

My strawberries are ready for the winter now. I put some mulch of leaves around them to keep the soil warm for them and it will decompose and give them nutrients over the winter.

So next spring I'll purchase a few more plants to add to my strawberry garden bed and I will also try to use some of the off shoots that the vines produce to add more plants to the garden.

Eggplants and Peppers and Recipes

We've had plenty of eggplant and peppers in the garden. I am trying to follow a more "back to nature" type of diet and cook with fresh products. I also want to incorporate what I can grow into the mix of what we eat. So since we've been having a lot of peppers and eggplants, I need to use them and we need to eat them. I have grilled the eggplant on the stove, made a couple eggplant lasagna dishes and I have been making lettuce free salads with the peppers I have and the few tomatoes that we are still getting.

The eggplant lasagna turned out quite tasty. I even made double and had my family over to enjoy the new recipe. Basically you replace the noodles with eggplant. I sliced the eggplants thinly and then coated them in egg (eggs from my chickens) then I placed them on parchment paper and baked them in the oven at 400 degrees until slightly brown, flipping them once to brown both sides. After that I layered a tomato sauce and beef mixture with Italian spices, then eggplant layer, then mozzarella cheese, alternating until done. The last layer of cheese on top, baked at 350 degrees for an hour then baked some more until the cheese browned on top and 15 minutes of cooling and it was done.

Everyone except my niece and nephew, one is 10 and the other 12 years old, were impressed. My niece and nephew wanted to know why I did not put noodles in it and they did not like the eggplant. Oh well, can't win them all. All the adults were happy and went for seconds, so that's what counts. Kids are so picky!

As I have mentioned before, I have been making salads now without lettuce. I like lettuce but I really do not miss it in our salads. I make salads with cucumbers, peppers and green onions and if tomatoes are available I add them too. I make an extremely simple recipe using a little bit of lemon juice and a little bit of olive oil. I also add salt and pepper. My husband and I also like dried mint in our salad too. I don't always add dried mint if we have company since not everyone likes it, but when it is just us, I do. Last night I even added an apple to our salad. The secret to making salads like this is to finely chopped everything. I sometimes add raisins, cranberries and/or feta cheese to the salad too. If you plan to add feta, remember to not add much salt, since it is salty on it's own.

I am sure you can add lots of other things also to a salad like this. I get creative and try to find a use to whatever we have a lot of and incorporate it into a salad or another dish I am cooking. Don't worry, I use fresh food items, nothing crazy.

Eggs and veggies

Today was another egg-less day but we did have a lot of vegetables to pick from the garden, I filled up my bucket to the top!

Here are all the veggies spread out, Swiss Chard, Yellow Beans, Zucchini, Squash, Egg Plant, Grape Tomatoes, Cucumber and Strawberries (oops, we ate those before I took this pic)

We added some of those cucumbers and tomatoes to our mezza meal. It was a nice middle-eastern brunch with hot tea. We had some fresh mint and oregano from the garden with the meal as well.

Garden Stuff

We enjoyed our first garden cucumber of 2013, it was delicious. I think garden cucumbers taste so much better then store bought! We had 3 squash and 2 cucumbers in the garden from yesterday afternoon to today. I have a drawer full of squash and zucchini now in the frig so I have to get creative with my recipes now to include more squash and zucchini, if all else fails just cooking them in olive oil in a frying pan with a little salt and pepper works out well.

I made a dish yesterday with squash, zucchini, brown rice, onions and chicken broth. I chopped up the onions, squash and zucchini into cubes and put them in the bottom of a large pot. I added the brown rice and then the chicken broth instead of the water. I sprinkled a lot of allspice and garlic on top and a little salt and some cinnamon. I boiled it and then covered it and cooked it until the rice was done. It was really good. I served it with a salad that was dressed with a little olive oil, lemon and salt. It was a good meatless meal.

Next time I need to remember to leave out about a half a cup of the broth or water since the rice also soaks up the liquid from the vegetables, so it took a lot longer to cook then I thought. (Although, not truly vegetarian because of the chicken broth.) After it was done, I took the pot and flipped it onto a big serving pan. It was kind of another version of a Arabic dish called "upside down", which is made similar but uses beef, eggplant, onions and rice.

I have lots and lots of green tomatoes in the garden now. I am just waiting for them to ripen up. We'll have grape, cherry and a variety of large ones ripening soon.

I love gardening, it is hard work but so worth the pay off of fresh fruits and veggies! Plus, I really enjoy getting my hands dirty and being a little self sufficient. I know exactly what went into the growing process of my produce too and I know that it is safe for my family to eat.

First Garden Harvest! SQUASH!

Here is a picture of the very first veggies from our garden this year picked this morning. We will probably have them with some salad and salmon. Should be good!!! Of course, I'll have to saute some onions with them too!

One of the squash looks a little bumpy, but I am sure it will taste good!

I found some grass fed ground beef at Costco and we had burgers last night with sauteed onions and salad. The salad was loaded with 3 colors of peppers, tomatoes and lettuce. I sprinkled a little lemon and olive oil on top with a little salt and garlic powder. Also, mint added to the salad adds a unique flavor too. I use dried mint or freshly chopped mint from my garden.

and just because I have this picture too, here is a picture of one of our Arabic breakfasts. It consists of foul (which is a bean dip) and labne (yogurt cheese) and fruits and pita bread. We also had hot tea with metamea  (which is sage) in it. I grow sage in my garden too. It was delicious. The labne is decorated with mint, tomatoes and olives.

I love middle-eastern food, it is delicious and healthy!

Since I mentioned the salmon and eating the yellow squash, I had to put a picture of the meal we had tonight. We found fresh raspberries and cherries at Costco so we had those with dinner. I made a pan seared salmon and we had sauteed veggies with the squash added in. It was really yummy. We are also trying to lose some weight and bring down our cholesterol so we are trying hard to cut out a lot of carbohydrates and stay as close to natural as we can. It is so not easy to stick to this plan, but it does get easier each day. 

Hopefully I'll be adding those free range organic eggs to our diets soon too.