Garden Food.....Tomato Corn Salad

The garden has started to produce and the meals we are eating are reflecting the bounty we are enjoying.  Most meals around our house lately include a plate of sliced tomatoes and  cucumbers - so good with a sprinkle of salt or pepper!  Last night I tried a new recipe I had seen on Pinterest for Buttermilk Grilled Chicken and wanted something to go with it.  This Tomato Corn Salad was just the ticket.  I shared some with my neighbor and she called to say she wanted the recipe, that her 14 yr.old grandson was drinking the juice from the bowl!

Tomato Corn Salad

INGREDIENTS

3 good sized tomatoes, chopped

1 small red onion, halved and thinly sliced

1/3 cup chopped green onions

1/4 cup balsamic vinegar

3 tabelspoons chopped fresh basil

1 tablespoon chopped fresh cilantro

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

4 cups fresh corn (about 9 ears of corn) - I used frozen

2 tablespoons olive oil

3 cloves finely chopped garlic

1 tablespoon dijon mustard

Optional - chopped olives, sweet bell/hot peppers or celery to taste

DIRECTIONS
In a large bowl, combine first 8 ingredients. In a large skillet, saute corn in oil until tender longer fro fresh, for frozen just until thawed. Add garlic; cook 1 minute longer. Stir in mustard. Add to vegetable mixture; mix well, toss to coat. Refrigerate briefly or serve immediately using a slotted spoon.  Enjoy! 

What's cooking from your garden? Do you have some tried and true favorite 'garden food' recipes?  Please share them in the comments!

Gardening Part 2 - Strawberry Security

We have attempted a harvest of strawberries for several years now, but every year without fail the sweet birds {gnashing of teeth} have beat us to each and every ripe delicious morsel.  SO...this year we got smart and brought in some reinforcements.  We knew if we wanted to really enjoy our strawberry patch we needed strawberry security.  We put our thinking caps on and The Principal designed a feathered friend proof enclosure that would allow God's good rain and sunshine in but keep those sweet little birds out!

Our strawberry patch is a permanent fixture built into one of our 4 square foot gardens, so all we had to do was give it a lid and we were ready for strawberry picking - fingers only - no beaks allowed.
Using some 2 x 2 pressure treated lumber, nylon mesh window screen and two 4 inch hinges our problem has been solved once and for all!  The Principal among his many talents has admirable carpentry skills and so a lovely spring afternoon, his skills and a few supplies produced this......
It is working out beautifully, sun and rain in, birds out!  To pick or fertilize The Principal installed a handle on the back side to easily lift the top and the hinges make getting it open for access easy peasy! 
We have been harvesting strawberries free of beak holes!  We have 2 types of plants and have a 2nd batch just starting to come in....yum.  
Here's a little Strawberry Trivia to wow your friends and family with while you enjoy some of the delicious treats that starwberry season brings...

Strawberry Trivia

• The average strawberry has 200 seeds
• More than 40 varieties of strawberries have been identified in the wild. Wild strawberries are fairly small in size and it wasn't until the 18th century that attempts to produce larger berries were sucessful.
• 1 acre of land planted with strawberries will produce 50,000 pounds of fruit.
• Fesh strawberries were once used as toothpaste as the juice cleaned discolored teeth.
• There is a centuries old custom that if you break a double strawberry in half and share it with someone else they will fall in love.
• Strawberries were once avoided by pregnant women because it was believed that their children would be born with 'strawberry' birth marks.
• If all the strawberries produced in California in one year were laid berry to berry they would wrap around the world 15 times.
• Strawberries are the only fruit with their seeds on the outside.
• Strawberries have a long-dated history of medical uses, the Romans for instance used them to alleviate symptoms of fainting, kidney stones, inflammation, diseases of the blood, liver and spleen, throat infections, bad breath, attacks of gout, melancholy and fever.
• In some places of Bavaria, country folk practice a spring ritual of tying small baskets of wild strawberries to the horns of their cattle as an offering to wood elves. The legend states that the elves, who love strawberries, will offer their gratitude producing healthy calves and an abundance of milk
• In Belgium there's a museum entirely dedicated to strawberries
• Strawberries are grown in every state in the United States and every province of Canada.
• The strawberry plant belongs to the same family of roses, genus Fragraria, together with other fruits such as apples and plums. The name of the genus comes from the Old Latin word for "fragrant". In modern Italian, the word for strawberry is still "fragola".

What is your favorite way to enjoy strawberry season?Wild strawberries are all fairly small in size, and it wasn't until the 18th century that attempts to produce strawberry plants with larger berries were successful

Gardening Part 1 - Why Garden?

Last year at this time our house had a For Sale sign in the front yard and a sad lackluster garden in the back yard. When The Lord made it clear that we were to stay put here for a while longer I began making mental plans for our garden this Spring. The Principal has been so busy with school and work but has still managed to squeeze in a few weekend/evening projects to make our garden the best it has ever been. Over the next few weeks, I want to share with you some of our methods and projects to encourage and inspire you in your efforts or even better to get you out there and playing in the dirt for the first time!! Today, I want to share with you the reasons we choose to invest our time, money and labor into our garden. Gardening is a blessing on so many levels it is really hard for me to decide what my favorite element or greatest blessing is. We have over the past 2 or 3 years been slowly creating a lovely little sanctuary in what was just an empty patch of grass when we bought our home 8 years ago.

We really enjoy our morning coffee and quiet time on our screened in patio. We love to get out there in early in the mornings and watch the antics of the birds and the many rabbits that poke around in the field behind us. We have bird houses, feeders and a bird bath which my guys gifted me for Mother's Day several years ago so we see plenty of activity from our feathered friends. We feed the birds the crusts left behind Wonder Boy's toast (he doesn't do crust and I'm not wasting homemade goodness!!) and anything else that may be bird worthy that does not get consumed. A few slices of staling cornbread provided much enjoyment and antics for us this past Sunday as we spent the afternoon playing board games on the patio - it had me singing "Mama's little birdies love cornbread cornbread, Mama's little birdies love stale cornbread" - this kind of thing - songs sung to the key of life happen often in this house - try it - it's great stress reduction!! But I digress...forgive me while I find my way back from the rabbit trail I was on..... The garden....It all started in a garden so it stand to reason that I always feel close to God when I am in the garden, how can you watch the birds, rabbits, the amazing-ness of a seed that turns into a plant and then ultimately provision and not be drawn directly back to The Creator of it all? I am humbled by the intricacy with which He weaves and works into even the smallest details! I love to witness the process of seed to plant to harvest - you cannot imagine the giddy delight we all had when we saw the first teeny tiny baby cutie patootie grapes on the vine a few weeks ago, it was downright goofy (there was no song for this - sorry).
As homeschoolers, there are endless opportunities to teach in the garden. I think a child who is able to put a seed in the dirt and then eat something he has nurtured and grown will forever be connected to God who created it, the earth that brings it forth and will have an awareness and respect for conversing and not wasting the provision that we have. A child who works in the garden gains a perspective that would not otherwise come easily in our packaged, constantly product consuming and overall thoughtless society (oops...soapbox). Even a very young child can garner some basic values of work = provision through a little time spent watering, weeding and caring for something alive and live giving.
The bounty of the harvest is naturally the ultimate goal. I would never have been drawn to learn to can, dehydrate and preserve to the degree that I have if I had not been involved in the process of producing the food that was harvested. There is such pleasure at sitting down to the family meal table and enjoying the fruits of your labor together as a family. The taste is so much better than anything that comes from a grocery store and you know what it has or more importantly hasn't been sprayed with. A garden is a labor of love in many ways, from running out to protect the young plants when a hail storm came suddenly, to being out there in the dark with flash lights covering the same tender plants when an unanticipated frost was forecast.
As a family we have worked together and shared the joys and disappointments when things have not gone as planned. This is the stuff that makes family family isn't it? This was not something I learned as a child, but oh the blessings of knowing these pleasures as a wife and mother are a treasure to me! Over the next few weeks, I will share with you about square foot gardening, herb gardening (Oh! How I love love love herbs), harvesting rainwater as well as some of the 'structures' that we have built to make our garden work for us.....please join me and please, if I have touched on something you want to know more about by all means ask....let me know what you are interested in hearing more about!
I am here for you!