Community Garden: Gardening and recipes

Lots of bug killing and weed eating and mowing and now with the heat and a small chance of rain the stuff will really start to grow again.

I need to till up a couple of small four by eight beds so they can be used for planting some seeds.

Have not seen the cats around for quite some time and after checking there are no more leaf eating caterpillars on the apple trees. It is hard to imagine just how much those three green critters actually ate and how small they were when they started and how a day and a half later how big they had grown. They could hardly move and the one just fell off the tree. If a lawn mower had hit that thing there would have been a huge mess. Try and picture that!

The butterflies are starting to show up and maybe we will have a whole bunch real soon. The birds are finding all the flowers with the thistle and seeds for them to munch on. The turtles are enjoying the water in the pond but the grass keeps them from swimming around too much. I think I saw the tracks of a pet alligator that someone turned loose in the pond. It must have been sucked up through the pipe from the creek while they were trying to fill the pond. Hopefully we will get some ducks back to help with weed control. The geese do nothing to help in the garden. They can sure stomp onions down to nothing though. We have had a slight issue with debris in the upper layers of the pond recently, but we’ve managed to use a net to sort that out. Our friend told us to look at pond skimmers on somewhere like www.lovefishtank.com/best-pond-skimmer/, so we might do that if it gets really bad, but at the moment I think we should be fine.

We got a little tractor work done and the leftover mulch and dirt piles were leveled out and spread out. We still have some leaf mulch in black bags that need to be spread out as soon as we can. It sure helps keep weeds down and works real well in the garden beds. The leaves then break down and make good fertilizer for the next plantings of seeds or plants.

The tomatoes are turning and ready to start getting picked. Once you start picking them they will try to produce faster and more often and will turn colors faster. So remember to be ready for some daily picking. Some tomatoes and a little diced onion and some jalapeno and some cilantro and salt and lemon freezies and you have some good garden salsa. You just have to learn to mix the ingredients to match your taste. Hot or salty or tomato tasting or however you want it. If you remove the seeds from the tomatoes and jalapenos I think the flavor is so much better without the seeds and they don’t get stuck between your teeth and when you remove the seeds you remove some of the heat that in my opinion, is not a flavorful type of heat.

So there you have it, gardening and recipes for items from the garden. Remember that the simpler you keep it the more flavor you get from all the ingredients.