The Gardener's Best Day

The best day for a gardener? The first day you manage to make a meal, entirely from garden harvest.

For me, that day was July 30th. I turned this:

Celery, potatoes, carrots, onions, green beans, tomatoes, okra and cabbage

Into this:

Yummy vegetable soup

A few minutes cleaning and chopping the veggies, a bit of time in the soup pot with some water, salt and pepper, and a meal that costs next to nothing.

The next day, I turned this:

Yellow, green and red tomatoes, a green pepper and red onion.

Into a Greek salad (sorry, no pic!). I added feta cheese, oil and vinegar, plus salt and pepper. Those items, of course, weren't from my garden, but still. That day, I had a toasted tomato sandwich for breakfast, the salad for lunch and leftover soup for supper. That's an entire day's worth of food, mostly from the garden.

This is the time of year when the garden starts producing enough to eat for most meals - and soon, will start producing enough to start preserving. In fact, the bowlful of paste tomatoes I picked yesterday have a date with some onions, garlic and celery, and will soon be magically turned into the first pot of sauce. The hot peppers are coming on strong, and will be roasted and picked and dried. The onions are ready to pull and cure, the first bed of potatoes is ready to be completely harvested - and replanted with fall crops.

This is the busy season in the garden, but the results make it all worth while!