Home-grown Goodness!

Not sure if I mentioned it before, but this year, my mother-in-law helped me start a winter garden.  Since we live in FL, that's pretty much a regular garden to those of you up North.  We planted tomatoes, onions of all shapes and sizes, peppers, broccoli, cauliflower, peas, carrots, beans, lettuce, swiss chard, squash, radishes and cucumbers.  Whew!  That was quite a list!  Not everything survived...we lost the cucumbers and squash and the peppers never got big enough...maybe next year!  

Garden in late October

Anyway...I just wanted to share the progress with you!  A while back, I started harvesting the green onions. Those suckers grow fast!  The great thing about them is after you snip them, they grow back.  I also picked some lettuce a while ago and a few radishes.  Today, I picked a bunch of green onions and chives, tomatoes, and green beans!  I'm so proud of my small bounty and I just couldn't contain myself.  I am very excited to cook and eat my veggies.  

My veggies!!  Chives, green onions, green beans, tomatoes.

Just a little note to those of you who don't think you can do this kind of thing...I have the blackest of black thumbs.  Seriously...I've killed an aloe plant...who does that?  It's a freaking cactus!  Yup, I did it.  I'm shocked that I've been able to keep multiple plants alive long enough to actually grow food...so if I can do it, anyone can do it.  All I've been doing to maintain my garden is watering it every day (sometimes less depending on the rain/humidity), and Miracle Grow once a week.

Another little thing I did was mix used coffee grounds into the soil.  You can pick these up for free from your local Starbucks.  Mine has a little area outside where they will bag up 5 lbs of grounds and leave them for your garden.  If you don't see any at yours, try asking...most locations are happy to let you take their used coffee. Why coffee grounds?  Glad you asked!  Brewed grounds add nitrogen to the soil which is a valuable nutrient for growing plants.  They also help to keep away snails and slugs!

I suspect he knows the big one is his...

Well readers, I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season.  Our family had a great Christmas...three of them, to be exact.  We spent a day with my mom and sister on the 22nd.  We opted out of the traditional Christmas dinner in favor of steaks and twice baked potatoes followed by a trip to SeaWorld.  This being Ayden's first trip to the park, he really enjoyed Shamu and the fireworks the most.  On Christmas day, we spent the day with Aaron's family snacking on all our favorite appetizers including my 'famous' spinach and artichoke dip (recipe coming soon) and the family trivia game.  Our third and final Christmas celebration was another trip to Aaron's family's house for a lovely ham dinner with his grandmother.  We feel so blessed to have such a wonderful family to spend time with.  We're really looking forward to the new year and wish you all nothing but the very best in 2013!