Late summer...vegetable smoothie to enhance breakfast

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We love to eat vegetables for breakfast. Here is a new way: a veggie smoothie. It is not very beautiful, but includes tomato, cucumber, apple, pear. The tomato and cucumber are from our own garden. Try it, it is so refreshing to go with whatever else you are having for your breakfast. The key is to chew it first for a few seconds before swallowing, like you are eating food and not just gulp it like you are drinking a beverage.

We had some of this smoothie left over. Here is what we did with it.

1. Mixed it with Malaysian red lentil curry over rice. It was like a fresh chutney!

2. Next day, we added the remainder to our pasta sauteed with eggplant, birch mushroom, and pine nuts.

The tomatoes shown here, we have picked from our yard; currently we are harvesting all the different varieties of tomato that we are growing this year. We even had some volunteer seedlings.

What we are harvesting

Some photos from yesterday -- parsley, zucchini and cabbage. We are still waiting for tomatoes to redden up here. It hasn't been hot enough this summer for them.

We also have bitter melon and eggplant almost ready to harvest.

Here are some of the things we have been harvesting in our kitchen garden.

Vegetables from Kitchen Garden

We look forward to eating the food we grow.

It starts early spring with the garlic chives, which we chop and add to our breakfast omelet. Then when the marjoram leafs out, that goes in the omelet. Breakfast is the way our garden products make their way into our daily food intake. Then we add chives, spinach, arugula, parsley, cilantro. Our omelet is mostly green by the time the zucchini is producing.

Now, in early August of a year in which summer has been cooler than usual -- we are now eating Japanese and Indian types of eggplant, zucchini, Japanese cucumber, cabbage, bokchoy, parsley -- mostly for breakfast. The eggplant and zucchini, we saute in a cast iron pan with a little oil, and drizzle soy sauce. Cabbage is shredded and eaten with a little dressing. Bokchoy, sauteed or steamed, with sesame oil and soy sauce.

How we compost at home

Our composting system is pretty conventional. We collect stuff in an old pot in the kitchen and bring it out to the composter in the yard, which also incorporates yard debris -- we also have a big pile for the overflow. We are not very diligent about doing the hard work of turning the compost, so it takes a long time to capture the finished compost. We usually have lots of completed compost in early spring when we dig it into the new vegetable beds, and then throughout summer we get more that gets added on top of the garden. We usually don't see the worms, they are happily underground!

What we collect in the kitchen: spent tea leaves, coffee grounds, fruit and vegetable peels, any other vegetable matter, cut flowers after we are finished enjoying them indoors

What we collect in the yard: weeds if they don't have seeds, fallen leaves, pruned undiseased plant matter, removed sod

Mowed grass stays on the lawn -- we used to collect them to add to compost but stopped doing that this spring

We collected several large bags of raked leaves from our trees last fall and are in the process of adding them to the compost pile; some of the leaves are partially decomposed already (linden, oak, maple, beech)

It is mid-May, and our local garden club had its sale.  I love this activity!  I dug and divided several types of perennials and walked 3 wagon-loads of potted plants to my neighbor's home for the sale.  My plants were priced from 2 to 3 dollars each.  I offered lily of the valley, cranesbill geranium, Chinese lantern plant, periwinkle (Vinca minor and variegated Vinca major), Siberian iris, Sedum (2 kinds), hosta (2 kinds), raspberry, Ostrich fern, feverfew, marjoram.

In return I bought a wagon-load of plants from other members' gardens and homes.  I got a pot each of pink and white forget-me-not, red bee-balm, and several woodland plants.

Snow in April

Tonight, in the moonlight, there were daffodils blooming that weren't blooming when I left home in daylight.

Tonight the forecast calls for one to three inches of snow.

Daffodils from yard

The daffodil flower buds were swelling.  One was blooming already, and the snow and ice were coming.  It was time to cut some stems and bring them inside.  In the house, they opened up in a day.  A subtle fragrance signals springtime.  There was just a little bit of snow.  My friend told me that daffodils come with their own anti-freeze so I don't need to worry about them.  There is a thick liquid inside the hollow stems, I wonder if this is the protective substance?

Signs of spring in yard

Today:  two yellow crocuses are blooming.  Young cardinals, both male and female, chasing each other through the linden tree and big yews.  Snow drops here and there.  Tulip foliage an inch high.  Daffodil buds swelling.

Tomorrow it is supposed to go below freezing again!

Composter in winter

Oops, forgot to put the photo of the composter...can you see it here in the back, by the fence?

Composting in mid-winter

Composting is easy even in winter, albeit slower and less material is added.  We mostly add vegetable matter from the kitchen and dropped leaves from houseplants.  We do have bagged fallen leaves, and we sprinkle them on top after adding new bits into the composter.  The hardest part is removing the lid after a big snowfall.  In the photo the composter is the black square thing in the back by the fence.

Aside from composting, dreaming about what we'll plant is the other mid-winter activity that keeps us connected to the garden.