While I'm fresh in from the garden, so was most of our dinner last tonight. I still marvel at my Doctor's recent comment - she asked if I exercised regularly, I replied, I work on our farm. She smiled and said, "That doesn't count." REALLY??? Could she please spend some time with us here? We have been busy, tilling, planting, watering, building boxes for the fingerling potato beds and just a touch of weeding. Once the planting is all finished (will it ever be?) the weeding will start in spades.... And let us not forget - we still have to mow the fields of gold (that's what we call our dandelion lawn) with our push mower. I figure the more we use it the more likely Dann will be to come over to my side and turn the whole yard into a garden!
I'm up at 5 am, and starting yard work usually within 30 minutes after having some quiet time. By 7am I'm out the door to the office, by 5pm we're home and Dann joins me in the yard or helping with yard related projects. Dinner happens sometime between 8pm & 9pm. Phone calls go unreturned and family and friends probably think we've forgotten them. We haven't and we miss being in touch and promise to call and visit soon! We are just taking advantage of every minute we can to get the garden set up. I am enjoying the lessons we are learning and look forward to the many more lessons we will learn this year that will help improve next year. The big project is setting up a system that will allow us to redirect our sump pump water to our garden beds. Dann is developing quite the system that will enable me to direct water to 4 different sections of the garden either individually or all at the same time.
So far we have the watermelon, musk melon, pie pumkin, butternut squash, corn, 3 different kinds of beans, most of our tomatoes seedlings, cucumber, basil, and 2 varieties of peppers, along with cilantro and basil - oh and let us not forget the salad greens and 1 batch of the fingerling potatoes planted. There is so much more to plant! But we are getting there.
Dinner is a celebration of our greens - salad and mustard greens. I cut the salad greens first thing in the morning. I learned while volunteering at Poplar Ridge Farm in NC that salad greens have a more tender flavor if harvested in the morning. When harvested later in the day the greens can taste bitter and may not even be edible as a result. The salad greens are growing right outside our front door so early morning harvest is just a short walk outside and times perfectly with the amount of time needed to steep my morning tea.
We had a tortellini soup with our salad. I saute 1 onion (Farmers Market) and 1 lb of Hot Italian Sausage (Duink Farm). Once the sausage is cooked through I add Chicken Stock (our boys) - use as much or as little as you like, cheese tortellini (we use Gondola brand - a local pasta maker), and about 10 large mustard green leaves (from our garden) - I chifanade the leaves.
We make a variation of this soup all year long changing it up with the season - kale, spinach, mustard greens, green beans, tomatoes, whatever we might have on hand. And as Dann said last night "That was the best soup, until the next pot you make!"
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