Packing

~ Highlight of the Day: Seeing my family! ~

It's been a lovely day. I slept in (as much as you can with a 5:40am habit and needing to use the restroom. . . ), sat on the porch while eating breakfast, packed to the Of Monsters and Men radio on Pandora, went on a field trip to a huge estate, gave away almost all my food, and showed my family the gardens.

I am always amazed at how much clothes weigh. As predicted, I'm totally pushing the 50 lb limit.

I took one last walk through the forest to the production greenhouses  (in all honesty I may walk this tomorrow, but I may not, so I'm playing it on the safe side).

My garden (now Maddie, Becca, and Sara's :) is still an overrun mess, but there are significantly less weeds then there used to be! It's still got a good month or two to spit out some veggies :)

We drove past all sorts of old ruins today - I want old ruins in my backyard. . .

All in all it's been a pretty good almost-last-day. I still have a few goodbyes to say tomorrow (sad ones . . . not that I've had any particularly happy goodbyes :), and after that we're off to Virginia!

Livin' Off the Land

~ Highlight of the Day: learning about bad bugs and the good ones that eat them! ~

I got to hang out with the IPM people today! I always thought I'd hate an IPM class, and that it'd only be difficult and gross. But I found it to be absolutely fascinating and so very useful.

And having not photographed any mealy bug or mealy bug destroyer (it's like a super hero bug :), I will now go on at length about that most fascinating topic: dinner.

 I'm actually rather proud of what I made tonight - everything was from my garden except the oil, noodles, salt, and cheese. I used quite a bit of produce, which is excellent because I need to finish it all in less than a week! Produce used in dinner included: four different colors of peppers, chives, basil, zucchini, and a ton of tomatoes.

I have discovered that I will eat just about anything if I grow it in my garden. If you had told me a few years ago that I would eventually be choosing to put chives and peppers in my meals I would have laughed. But this summer I grew peppers, so eat them I will! There's just something different about eating things you've grown in the garden. So I'm thinking there will be personal gardens for my kids who don't like their veggies :)

The red ones are hot, which I suspected but did not think to confirm until after I cut one up.

Yep. And back to the book. I'm so close to being done, but I'm not sure I'll be able to finish in the next week. . . keep your fingers crossed, because if I don't finish it now it will be at least 4 months before I can!

New York, New York

~ Highlight of the Day: Terrace pizza and chocolate mousse cake. ~

My family is not entirely plant minded. Everyone mows, to some extent, my mom weeds when she has time, and my sister likes plants but is convinced she kills them. I have no idea what my brothers think of it all, and my dad likes a good looking yard, but is allergic to stuff outside, like grass. So gardens have never really been on our lists-of-things-to-do-on-vacation, or even locally.

Being here at Longwood is totally different. We take all sorts of field trips to gardens, like they're the most important attraction around (because they are the most important attractions around :) and actually enjoy it all quite thoroughly. Today we drove to New York City, not to see the Statue of Liberty, or Time Square, or Broadway, but to see the High Line.

This is the place that has the odd cement planks for the floor, with the cool transition from path to flower bed. I've seen it on Pinterest so many times, but I didn't know it was taken here!

They had the coolest water feature - it was just a section of the path with grates on either side of it. On one side water came up to run across the path to the other grate, where it fell underneath and (I'm assuming) is pumped back up to the other side. How perfect for a hot summer day? It's just enough water to get your feet wet and splash around a bit in, but not enough to really cause any safety issues. You could walk across it with shoes on and stay dry. It's just brilliant. I loved it. Just look at that adorable little kid getting his feet wet!

Baby Watermelons!

~ Highlight of the Day: Discovering a second baby watermelon! ~

I am so excited. I don't care that they probably won't mature before I leave. I have succeeded in growing watermelons! I've wanted to do this since I found a baby watermelon plant (or what I thought was a baby watermelon plant) in my favorite seed spittin' spot in my backyard back when I was just a wee child :)

I'll have to take a picture with my ukulele in it for scale :) There will most likely be very consistent updates on these guys. What can I say, they've won me over completely!

The rest of my garden's kind of a mess. . . I need to do some tidying up. I found these interesting little guys on one of my zucchini's . . . they kind of remind me of African horned melons. Or aliens.

Garden Dinner

~ Highlight of the Day: Being caught in a text war between my dad and my sister ~

I love to cook. I could cook all day long (and sometimes do), and dirty every dish in the kitchen (too often do). Same goes for baking. So if this starts to feel like a weird-stuff-Rachel-cooks blog, I apologize :)

Today's dinner:

I may or may not have added more
cheese after taking this picture. . . gotta
balance out the veggies!

Woohoo! It actually turned out well! This meal had one goal - use as many things out of the garden as possible. So it includes one large Brandywine tomato, one awesomely orange mystery pepper, some chives, basil, and zucchini. I was very pleased with myself, and even more so when it actually tasted good :)

I think using bright colored ingredients is just plain fun.

Exclamation Points!

~ Highlight of the Day: A nice, cloudy, breezy, cool morning ~

Title note: I seem to have been using exclamation points a lot in my post titles. . . for a while it was these, ". . . ", but now it's exclamation points. I may need to put a conscious effort into breaking this habit, so if they start getting on your nerves, don't worry, it's being worked on! :)

I love how different gardens have different styles. We visited Chanticleer today, and I thought it was absolutely amazing. Just to sum it up nicely I'd say it's somewhat of a cross between Longwood and Scott Arboretum. It's much more formal than Scott, but not as dependant on annuals and constant display changes like Longwood.

The ruins were such a lovely contrast of stark, structural architecture  and natural, whimsical plantings. I wonder how hard would it be to build some ruins in the backyard. . .

Zucchini!

~ Highlight of the Day: coming home to zucchini bread ~

Zucchini. I am up to my eyeballs in the stuff. I mean, this always happens, so you'd think the surprise would wear off and I'd learn to deal with the huge influx of it. . . but  apparently not. So I think I'll have some zucchini and eggs, and zucchini bread, and steamed zucchini, and fried zucchini, and boiled zucchini, and then maybe some more zucchini bread :)

This morning's harvest. . .

This morning I whipped up a double batch of zucchini bread. It was a lot. Of everything. But it only called for 4 cups of grated zucchini, and I'm pretty sure I got away with 5 1/2, so it did put at least a small dent in my zucchini problem.

I had to use the biggest bowl in the kitchen. . .

At least I know I won't ever run out of veggies for the rest of the summer :)

Kohlrabi!

~ Highlight of the day: harvesting mostly everything for dinner from my garden! ~

This purple beauty is a Kohlrabi. My neighbor gave me six tiny little starts of this in May, and now they are ready to harvest! I honestly had never had it before and I didn't know how to cook/eat it, but today I decided to give it a try. So I turned to the oh-so-dependable Wikipedia for guidance. Did you know this was related to cabbage and broccoli? I had no idea. And sure enough, it smells like broccoli. Exactly like broccoli. So here's my first kohlrabi attempt:

From left to right: lemon balm, mysterious peppers (all 3 kinds),
 kohlrabi, and basil.

I can't wait to have this as my veggie for
lunch on Monday! It sure beats carrots.

I made fried egg-something-flour pancakes. It's awesome how well that recipe lends itself to experimentation, I was totally making it up as I went.

I would just like to state that kohlrabi is delicious. It has a sweet, crisp broccoli flavor. Just a random connection - the scientific name of kohlrabi is Brassica oleracea, which is the same as ornamental cabbage, and what my house on the row is labeled as!

I also finally found the answer to a matter that has been weighing down on me quite a bit lately. What is the plural of 'fez'? Well, I was reading my O Jerusalem book and came across it:

My fruitless attempts at coming up with a correct-looking spelling are finally at an end!
Fezzes are cool. :)

Needless to say, today was quite productive! I've discovered a tasty new vegetable and learned how to spell 'fezzes', what more could I ask for? :)

I Woke Up Thursday Morning. . .

~Highlight of the Day: Seeing the brand new air conditioner that's going to be installed in the dining room tomorrow - it was indeed love at first sight. ~

Just look at this beauty! It brings tears to my eyes!

Today our weekly intern field trip took us to the Ambler campus of Temple University (about an hour away) for a lovely tour of  their beautiful gardens. It was a small but well landscaped, altogether an enjoyable place :)

 I will someday (when I have the space and time and money) have one of these in my garden:

And to top off an already good day, I used chives out of my garden for dinner!

I think I might be sad my internship is ending soon, now that I can come home to an air conditioned home. . . :)

And It Rained, and Rained, and Rained. . .

~ Highlight of the Day: Sleeping in and waking up to rain! ~

Our float down the Brandywine river was canceled today. . . it's just not as appealing in the rain. Instead we drove out to the Jenkins Arboretum for the iris sale. I have never seen so many iris' in my life, it was fantastic! They had a room full tables of them, sorted by color, which was great because I was on a mission for the perfect yellow iris. Here's what I came home with:

They wrote the cultivar right on the foliage, how brilliant is that?! I will have to remember that if I ever run an iris sale :) The cultivars I got were 'Red Skies', 'May Debut', 'Kentucky Derby', 'Again and Again', and 'Indian Chief'

After neatly cleaning out the sale we walked around the arboretum for a bit. Apparently their thing is azaleas, because they were everywhere. That, combined with the light mist-like rain and mossy paths made me feel almost right at home - honestly it was so much like Washington I could almost fool myself into believing it. . . I think I'm going to design a pond with lilly pads in it for my parent's yard. And I need to try and grow a pawpaw tree there too.

Oh yes, I harvested my Brandywine tomato, the one that could feed China for a week it's so big:

And just in case you haven't noticed yet, the uke seems to pop up in pictures where ever. So of course I included my ukulele in a picture of my tomatoes.

Speaking of tomatoes, I am still on a quest for a reasonably priced dvd of "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes". I must watch it. soon. So if you stumble across one, let me know!