Lemon Balm Tea

A few years ago, we accidentally acquired a lemon balm plant when purchasing our garden plants. Upon discovering that it makes a wonderful and soothing tea, we bought a couple more plants and encouraged new starts. Today, we have quite a lot of lemon balm out in the garden on the west end of the house.

When the leaves are dried, the lemon balm makes a better tea than when the leaves are fresh. Either way, once the leaves have been used they go out into the compost bin. As I was cleaning the tea pots this morning, I was struck by the circle of our tea: it starts out on the west end of the house, comes inside, goes into the compost bin on the east end of the yard, and then is spread about wherever needed. A perfect cycle would have the compost going back to the tea plants in the garden.

Good Eats Tonight

I made two loaves of bread today. One is a pesto wheat bread for tomorrow night's dinner with the Jessicas. The other is an oat bread for us. We had slices of it tonight for dinner with some of Danny's pesto and our tomatoes on top. He added slices of fresh cayenne pepper to his but I am not into spicy...no!

I also baked two of the small spaghetti squash and we had those topped with the leftovers from yesterday.

Homegrown and homemade...gotta love it!

Dinner Tonight? Lots of Homegrown Goodies

We harvested the first of the spaghetti squash today - eleven beautiful yellow squash! These are easy to cook - slice in half, remove the seeds, place face down on a baking sheet and bake for an hour. Let cool for few minutes after removing from the oven, and then use a fork (or a spoon - your choice) - to pull out all the strands. Tonight's dinner featured one of our fresh squash topped with Danny's homemade meat-and-veggie loaf and a side dish of homebaked wheat bread topped with homemade pesto (from our basil, of course) and diced homegrown tomatoes. Yes, I should have taken a picture. But I was hungry.

I do have a picture of some of the squash bounty:

as well as other pictures from today:

Closeup of the cayennes turning red - pretty!

The peppers...yes, that is a basil in the "odd" pot.

The basils are still looking great despite the near-constant harvesting!

We've eaten lots of these tomatoes so far.

I'm not posting a picture of the squash garden as it's clearly nearing the end of its lifecycle and looks rather pathetic. We'll be getting a few more squash, but then that will be that. Interestingly, when this squash experiment first started, I read all over the Internet about how to grow them, and one constant was that it takes "90 days" for the squash to ripen. Nowhere does anyone say 90 days from WHAT. Based on this experiment, it seems that the 90 days is from the time of germination, since our seeds were started in April and here we are, chowing down on ripe fruit about 90 days later.