Saturday morning hash browns (aka “Queen of the flippin’ hashers”)

A couple of weeks ago I picked a zucchini and a squash and some tomatoes out of my garden and really wanted to eat them for breakfast. I thought about putting them in my scrambled eggs, but that seemed a little boring, so here’s what I did instead:

Ingredients:
1 medium zucchini, sliced into medium rounds
2 roma tomatoes, diced small
frozen hash browns
3-4 strips of bacon
your favorite shredded cheese
salt
pepper
butter

Pre-heat the oven to 400.

In an oven-safe saute pan, fry the bacon until it’s as done as you like it. Pull it out and put it on a plate to drain, but keep the bacon grease in the pan. Add enough butter to the grease to give you a good turn of the pan’s worth of fat. Pour in a decent layer of hash browns, and season with salt and pepper. Chop (or crumble) the bacon while the hash browns are cooking. Fry the hash browns without stirring until golden on the bottom, then slide them in one piece onto a plate. Add more butter to the pan. Lay in the zucchini rounds. Sprinkle on the bacon. Take the plate of hash browns and flip it over into the pan so that the uncooked side of the hash browns is directly on top of the bacon and the cooked side is facing up. Sprinkle with cheese and tomatoes and stick it in the oven until hot and melted. Enjoy!

One medium pan’s worth is enough for two people to eat for breakfast without needing anything else. Add eggs, toast, and fruit, and you have enough for three or four.

it’s time to garden!!

It’s so beautiful outside today, and there’s so much sunshine! I just can’t not be outside putting seeds into the garden. We’re tackling the side bed today, putting in columbines (these and these), nasturtiums for some vining fun, ipomosis, and alyssum.

Later, I’ll be getting other started indoors: broccoli, mini red bell peppers, San Marzano tomatoes, an heirloom tomato that I saved seeds from this summer, strawberries, lavender, rosemary, begonias, and a couple of hibiscus plants.

Perfect accompaniment for the Harry Potter marathon on TV tonight.

Summer’s Bounty

I must be truthful and admit that I didn’t grow this amazing produce. It came from my local farmer’s market. I had so much of it on Saturday that I just had to pile it up and snap a pic. Doesn’t it look amazing?

Way cool

So, I stopped on a plant nursery on the way home to pick up a few more flower seeds. I was hoping for marigolds and primroses, but the pickin’s are still kinda slim. I could understand that in some place cold, but here in the South…? Don’t get it.

Anyhow, I got some larkspur, some sweet peas for our new lamp post, and something called fragrant stock. And I got some dahlias too, big ones called Caribbean Fantasy and Strawberry Ice. I want to eat that one.

And when I got home I discovered that the cucumber that was peeking out this morning is standing up tall and the tomatoes are comin’ right up!

But the really exciting thing is the plant I found at the nursery. I wasn’t even looking for plants. I was wandering around trying to find someone who could tell me how to store my dahlia tubers, and I found this plant. It’s a Euphorbia wulfenii.

Isn’t it cool?! It’s so architectural, like a palm tree with flowers on top.

Here’s a shot of the blossoms.

And best of all…the gardener said that it even makes little baby plants. 

And up they come!

I planted seeds on Tuesday. The first seedlings poked their little heads out on Thursday. And here they are today.  :)

New every year

It’s amazing every year. I line up the pots, fill them with dirt, stick dead, dried-up little seeds in them, and in two weeks give or take a little, I have live, green, growing things. I suppose it’s kind of cliched to talk about seedlings like this every spring, but the eight year old inside me is still wowed by it every. single. time. I look at the different seed shapes and imagine the plants that will grow, and I think to myself that we have one really cool God.

It’s that time again…

I realized it when I stopped by the garden store to grab some clippers and get some advice on salvaging the bulbs that I got last year but didn’t know when to plant. (If that sounds strange to you, here in the South, planting bulbs isn’t so easy. It freezes in December, then goes back up to the 70s in February and then freezes again in March, so bulbs are more like annuals than perennials.)

So while I was at the garden store, I expeditiously picked up a a big ole bag of potting soil and a package of strawberry seeds to go in the beds at our new house. (A post on that will follow soon, as soon as I can get some pictures.) And I stopped at Lowe’s and grabbed some trays that they were going to throw away to use for my seed starting trays. And I stopped at the grocery store to grab food for dinner and two packages of styrofoam cups (far superior to peat pots–no mold!) and a package of plastic coated freezer paper to line my trays with to catch the water. And now I’m home and looking at all of my seeds trying to decide what to plant first.

If I get them planted tomorrow, I should see the first flower seedlings in about two weeks and the first of the veggies shortly thereafter. The strawberries will take longer, probably four weeks.

I can’t wait.

A peck of peppers

Before the frost came, I picked all the remaining peppers off of my plants.

Salad anyone?

It’s time to start planting fall and winter veggies!

Well, actually, the time to do that was about three weeks ago. Sigh. But three weeks ago, I was hanging out in the Yucatan, and winter veggies were the farthest thing from my mind. So now I’ve just gotta work with what time I have left.

I’ve gotten all stoked up about this thing called Square Foot Gardening. If it works even half as well as it’s supposed to, I ought to be practically drowning in produce. I hope it does work. It’ll be an awful lot nicer to grow plants in maintenance-free compost than trying to fix the clay that passes for dirt around here. I was shuddering at the prospect of having to rent a rototiller for all 60 square feet of yard that I’ve got and then still have to buy all the compost and peat moss and who know what else to make this clay habitable for veggies and flowers. Here’s hoping….

You can see my garden layout here. I’m terribly excited about it.

In other happy news, the pepper plants and the tomatoes have come back from virtual death and are chugging along towards another crop before frost. They almost didn’t survive my absence. Not only was I not here to talk nicely to them, but the neighbor kid that I was going to pay to water them just never showed up. And there was record heat and no rain the whole two weeks that we were gone. Darn kid. Thankfully, my next-door neighbor watered them just enough to keep them alive, and they’ve fully recovered. It’s nice to see them sitting contentedly out there on the patio, all bushy and happy.

My in-the-ground plants are doing well too. I hacked a small corner garden out of what seemed to be solid rock, filled it with real garden soil, and planted a hibiscus plant and a few annuals that I rescued off the “dead and dying” rack at Lowe’s. The hibiscus plant is growing like crazy, and the annuals are almost ready to flower again. My dad seeded the lawn for me too, and after only one week, there are several healthy looking clumps of grass poking up. (Thanks, Dad!!! ) The grass should be in full display in another two weeks or so. At least the yard doesn’t look like an abandoned lot any more.

I never thought I would enjoy gardening. When my family was here a week ago, my mom reminded me of the many times that I vowed I would never EVER voluntarily put anything in the ground. But I really like it now. Maybe because it’s more manageable. All the veggies are in pots right now, so there’s no weeding, and the lawn just needs a good watering as often as the water restrictions allow. I find it all very pleasant. The raised beds for the winter and for next year will be a major step up from my pots, but I don’t think it’ll be enough to make me hate it again. And it is awfully nice to have fresh veggies right from my own garden. They’re more convenient than a trip to the store, and they taste so much better!

See Spot Grow

And Tom and Jane and Sarah and Harry and….

Little green seedlings are popping up all over the place. There’s at least one of everything peeking out of his or her comfy little peat pot. It won’t be long now until they graduate to the big plant pots.