Cucumber lineup

It's the whole family! :-)

A "Summery" of the Garden

Here are some updated pictures of the garden!

The beans in the new bed in front of the house (I'm not sure what possessed me to want to plant more beans!!)

The potatoes (they're really small, I know. The soil has some deficiencies, but we'll work on building it up)

Romaine lettuce, yellow zucchini, volunteer zucchini and pole beans

Swiss chard! I planted a variety called "bright lights" and it's very pretty, with yellow, red, pink, purple and green stems/veins on the various plants.

 Onions, marigolds and beets

Basil and onions

Carrots and tomatoes!

Peppers and cukes (LOTS of cukes!)

 The new bed in back (we put a row cover on it for a little while) with kale and lettuce

 I tried sun-drying some kale to make kale chips. It worked pretty well until it started getting windy and blowing the dried kale away! I had to finish them in the dehydrator.

 It's an apple. It's an alien. It's kohlrabi!

The lettuce out back

This tomato looks like three growing together!

 Spinach (I'm surprised that this spinach actually grew over the summer! I guess it was cool enough for it up here)

I'm currently harvesting cucumbers every day, and yellow zucchini every other day or so. The beans are slowing down a bit, thankfully (since we have PLENTY of them already!). We have enough lettuce for us to eat about 10 salads per day...  most of the broccoli is in and processed, along with the cauliflower... what else. Oh yeah! We made our first batch of basil pesto! It is SOOO delicious. I should pick more of that soon. Anyways... let's just say I'm almost a vegetarian these days. :-) I even brought in a head of cabbage yesterday. That is significant because I thought that the cabbages were goners due to the out-of-control cabbage worms.

I'm happy that our garden this year has been very rewarding. We are greatly blessed with lots of produce!!

Just a Peek!

It's hard to capture the summertime in photos (especially at my house! ;-). Here's an attempt at it, in any case. Enjoy the pictures!

I went for a walk one of the two dirt roads that connects my house's road to the main route. It's actually rather scenic all year round, but the summer greenery and wildflowers add a lot to it.

On the way...

One of the splendid views along the way.

The road home.

A fine specimen of a butterfly

Queen Anne's lace

The little pond by the road.

In another post I will have photos of my "exploding" garden!  Let's just say we've put away enough beans (pole beans and bush beans) for... well, maybe two or three winters? :-) And with over 40 kale plants, which are all ready to be harvested, kale chips are definitely on the menu!

Garden greens

Nothing like a fresh-picked mesclun salad...

...with garlic scapes and homemade lettuce/scape pesto!

What's in the Garden?

I said that I would post pictures of the garden, so here they are!

The potatoes (the garlic is just past them)

The black seeded Simpson lettuce

Mesclun and more Simpson lettuce

The rather anemic-looking summer squashes (the soil needs more nitrogen in general)

Eggplant

Pole beans!

Romaine lettuce (some of which we already harvested)

Cabbage...

 

Onions and broccoli

The beets that mysteriously sprung up that I never actually planted right there...

Carrots!

Tomatoes and peppers (with radishes sprinkled in)

Pole beans (cucumbers are down at the end under the trellises)

Sad-looking sweet potato vines... :(

Snap peas

The basil bed

More onions!

More broccoli! (We have cauliflower growing, too)

And the garlic again!

We also got some strawberries from the farm, which will hopefully produce next year.

I am looking forward to raspberries! There are lots of plants growing in the woods in our backyard. I've already seen some tiny green berries.

We are being inundated with lettuce! It's nice being able to have salad for every meal, though! Some friends of ours are juicing theirs, they're getting so much. :-) We are going to attempt to make pesto out of garlic scapes and lettuce. Has anybody out there ever tried it?

"No Healthy Diet" website plug

Recently I wrote a post for a blog that a friend of mine started. The blog focuses on maintaining a gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free healthy diet. You can find recommendations, recipes and products, along with some tips for avoiding foods containing allergens. I hope you check it out! The blog gets updated several times a week. It's an excellent resource to be aware of, whether you can use the information yourself, or know someone who has an allergy to dairy, gluten and/or soy.

Can you spot the common allergens in this photo? :-)

 http://nohealthydiet.com/
And here's the link to the post that I wrote:
http://nohealthydiet.com/healthy-diet-plan/essentials-for-a-healthy-diet/

P.S. I am going to post photos of our family's garden as soon as I get our camera back! :-)

30-Day Bible Challenge

In May I attended a day-long conference geared toward equipping and encouraging young people to share the gospel. While I was there, one of the speakers gave a challenge: For 30 consecutive days, read 2 Bible verses in the morning and evening, and meditate on what you read. I read the Bible each day anyway, but I still decided to take the challenge, and along with meditating on what I read, write down some of my thought about the various passages.

Even from day 1 I felt encouraged and refreshed by the Word of God all over again! I think that actually writing down the things I learned about the verses that I read really gave me the desire to explore them further and dig deeper into the truths that they contained. Certain things just seemed to "click" as I pondered the verses, how they applied to me, and how I should live in light of them. Just goes to show that the Bible is a living book, and you can never fully plumb its depths!

So here's the challenge.
For 30 days, read 2 Bible verses (it can be more!) in the morning and in the evening, meditate (think about) what you read, and jot down some of your thoughts about the verses. I hope you take the challenge, and if you don't already read your Bible daily then I hope you make it a habit!


If you decide to take the challenge, then please comment! Also, if you want to share any of the thoughts that the Lord brings to your mind along the way, then feel free. I would love to share some of thoughts He's blessed me with.