Cooking from our Garden
The Plant Diaries Pt. 7
In case you missed it, I started a new series on Overbooked Mama called The Plant Diaries where I’m attempting to document our Spring backyard gardening adventures. This week I’m back with a thoughtful birthday gift and some status updates from our porch.
It’s officially summer and our patio garden is in bloom. If you missed it, our raised beds were mostly a miss and I planted lots of things in pots on our front porch instead. While we were at the beach, our first tomatoes and jalapenos ripened enough to pick! I diced them up and added them to the breakfast burritos I prepped for Father’s Day. While we won’t have a huge harvest this year, it brings me a lot of joy to watch my kids track the progress of each plant’s growth and pick fresh strawberries as a snack on the way out to the car. I caught the sweetest interaction on our Ring doorbell of my son excitedly telling his daddy that “may-dohs” were red and ready. Gardening has provided a lot of glimmers lately and I can’t recommend it enough as a family activity.
For my birthday, my friend Hannah gifted me two garden-themed bookish gifts. It warms my heart to feel so seen and known. Both of these books are perfect for this stage of our gardening journey.
The Vegetable Garden Planner: A Crop-By-Crop Guide for Planning and Tracking Your Garden Bounty Each Year, from Seed Starting to Harvest by Lynn Byczynski is a neat lay-flat notebook organized alphabetically by vegetable, with several pages of note space to compare one year's plant growth, variety performance and flavor, harvest amounts, weather trends, and pests. I’ve fallen back in love with journaling on paper this year and I can picture myself sitting out on the porch with this planner and a cup of coffee before it gets too hot out.
Grow Your Own: Crops in Pots: With 30 Step-By-Step Projects Using Vegetables, Fruit and Herbs by Kay Maguire includes a crop directory with tips on the best way to grow more than 60 vegetables, fruit, herbs, and edible flowers. I’m looking forward to reading more tips for identifying and solving problems with container gardens and using some of that information to fill in my garden planner book!
This might be my final newsletter for The Plant Diaries series this summer. If we decide to plant a Fall garden, I’ll be sure to bring you along for the journey. You can take a look back at my previous newsletters below.
Let’s get growing!
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How exciting to harvest your own tomato and jalapenos! I tried a few container plants this year on our three season porch but only the herbs have lasted.
Thank you for letting us peek into your summer gardening life. My basil, surprisingly, is still alive and kicking. Miracles do happen!