Grilled Corn Salsa

A great recipe to use fresh veggies from your garden!

INGREDIENTS

5 ears of corn on the cob

1 bell pepper, any color

1 jalapeno

1-2 poblano peppers or another similar pepper.

1 red onion

1 lime

Olive Oil

1/2 bunch of Cilantro

Salt, to taste

DIRECTIONS

Lightly oil corn and place all veggies on the grill. Turn veggies often and cook on medium high for approximately 15 min until charred. Place peppers in a brown paper sack or closed container and let steam for 15 minutes to help remove outer skin.  (Make sure you also remove the seeds) Cut corn off cobs and put in a bowl with chopped peppers, onion and cilantro. Season with squeezed lime and salt. 

Can be eaten with chips as a salsa or serve over tacos. 

Garden Scrambled Omelette

One of my favorite things about gardening is finding ways to use the fresh vegetables in our cooking. Omelettes are so versatile because you can add whatever ingredients you like and the options are endless. It's also healthy and filling! 

INGREDIENTS

3 eggs

2 T. milk

Shredded Cheese

Cherry Tomatoes

Bell Pepper

Kale/Spinach

Jalapeno Pepper

Red Onion

Zucchini

Butter to sauté vegetables

Bacon, cooked and crumbled 

Salt & Pepper

DIRECTIONS

Crack eggs into a bowl, add milk and whisk until combined. Add salt and pepper to taste and set aside. 

Chop all vegetables to equal approximately 1/3 cup. In a fry pan on medium heat add a little butter and sauté veggies for 1-2 minutes. Pour eggs over veggies and sprinkle with bacon and cheese. Slowly stir until eggs are cooked to desired consistency. Plate and enjoy.

What is your favorite combination of ingredients for an Omelette?

Flower Planters

This year I have been focusing a lot of my time to learning everything I can about flower planters. Working part time at a green house helped me to ask a lot of questions and learn some basic skills about planting flowers, growing environments, fertilizing, watering and deadheading. For 16 years I've bought flowers at the green houses and arranged pots in a way that I thought would look best but it was so much fun to learn about simple growing principles that hadn't crossed my mind.

A few notes:

Begonia's love shade. The flowers are edible! I think they have citrusy taste and would be a good edition to salads. Begonia's have a male and female flower and of course the male flower is larger and more full than the females. If you want larger male flowers simply pluck the females off once they have bloomed. 

Begonia leaves do not like water....it can aid in dry ugly burn marks on the leaves. It is best to water underneath the leaves close to the roots. 

My youngest loved coming over to visit us at the greenhouses and even got to plant her own planter. She had the best time walking around deciding which flowers she wanted in her pot and arranged them beautifully!

Can you spot the hummingbird? They love planters, especially these beautiful fuchsia flowers. If you want to attract hummingbirds and bees, add more variety of flowers to your yard! They are so much fun to watch. Fuchsia do better in part sun environments so mine have struggled a bit in this hot summer weather but I couldn't resist trying because they are so beautiful.

Normally the garden center I work for doesn't provide a service of planting herb containers but a lady talked us into it and I had a lot of fun planting and watching these herbs grow. It probably would've been best to plant 2 separate containers because some herbs grow better together than others but she wanted a little of everything so here we go! 

A shade planter...I love the colors!

A picture of the planters right after I moved them out of the greenhouses. They had been growing for about a month. It's important to water full sun planters every day and fertilize once a week. You can tell the difference below how much the flowers have grown over the pots. I love how they drape onto the ground. 

Sweet potato vines are the bright green leaves. They thrive in sun and definitely don't like cold weather. We had a cool spring and had to protect them a few times so they wouldn't die. Bugs also love sweet potato vines and will eat holes thru your beautiful plants so its best to spray a bug preventative every couple of weeks or more if they are downright pesky.

Lastly, when deciding what to plant remember 3 things.....thriller, filler, spiller. A thriller is something that will grow tall in the middle such as a spike, Canna Lily or Ornamental Grass. Second, you want to add fillers around the thriller such as Begonia's or Geraniums. And lastly, the best things to grow around your edges are spillers such as Sweet Potato Vine, Bocapa, Lobelia's, Verbena's or anything else that likes to drape beautifully over your pots.