Alas! With our wedding a mere 17 days away, I haven’t had the time to post as much as I’d like. No worries though, I have a bunch more things planned (solar cooker, mini-greenhouse, and upside-down planting, oh my!), and I’ll be back to regular posts starting the beginning of August when we get back from our honeymoon!
In the meanwhile, our suburban sustainability has begun to really pay off.
We get fresh quail eggs every day.
Fry them in a pan with a little bit of season salt...and they make amazing appetizers!
My fiance’s jalapeno plant is growing more peppers than I though possible for such a small bit of greenery. We’re contemplating how to use them all. Ideas?
He likes to surreptitiously slip these into stir fry.
This was our first zucchini. We’ve got a couple more that are almost ready, and more that will be ready in the next weeks. We chopped it up, fried it, seasoned it with soy paste, and it was DELICIOUS! Best zucchini I’ve ever had.
And our thirteen tomato plants are all growing a ton of tomatoes. I can tell we’ll be making a lot of gazpacho, tomato sauce, salads, and salsa.
These are the "Extreme Bush" variety. So far I'd recommend - very hardy, lots and lots of tomatoes, minimal staking required. Let's see how they taste!
Here’s what our garden looks like now.
Mostly tomatoes on the right, eggplants, sunflowers, squashes, and cucumbers on the left.
VEGGIE GARDEN’S DAILY TIME INVESTMENT: 2-3 minutes. We’ve set up an automatic sprinkling system with different sprinkler heads for the different plants. I just go out there to do some sporadic weeding, fertilize once every week or two, and to check what veggies are ready for picking. Easier than going to the grocery store.
In other news, my mom gave me a few hanging flower baskets. They look lovely. I water them twice a day. A couple of times while watering them, a little finch flew out of one of the baskets. “How strange,” I thought. The third time it happened, I knew it couldn’t be a coincidence. I brought a chair over, and peered inside.
The bird had built a nest in there! Here I was, unknowingly watering her eggs. From that point on, I watered really carefully around the nest.
Yesterday morning, they hatched.
The lovely basket my mom gave to me.
And inside…
Tired babies!
Be back soon!
Suburban Sustainability 
so adorable, andrea! it really does look like the fruits (forgive me) of your labor are truly paying off — and how wonderful! : ) your garden makes me think of “the secret garden” and eden all at once.
take care and have a beautiful wedding and honeymoon! you deserve it!
You have a very prolific garden. California is a good place to grow produce. Keep up the good work. It tastes so much better than the store.