I have a soft spot for “The minimalist” lists over @ the New York Times.

This one doesn’t disappoint. 101 Summer Salads. Each one sounds yummier then the next – and they all look super easy!

We’ve been busy in the garden and kitchen, and it’s been hard to find time to blog.   Look at how beautiful the garden looks this year.  Everything is so lush…..

“Everything is so greeeeen!”

If you look really hard you can see just the very top of Chaim’s head behind the sunflowers in the back of this bed….

This is the Tomato Bed.  There are about 45 plants in this bed.

This is a small portion of our Garlic harvest :)

Garlic Scape Pest0**

Garlic Scapes. We snip them off the Garlic plants so that the plant energy goes into making delicious cloves of garlic rather than wasting that energy producing a flower.

The first year we grew garlic, we sniped those scapes right off and promptly threw them on the compost pile…. and saw them the very next day for $6 a pound at Farmers Market. D’oh!

I experimented with a few recipes and fell in LOVE with making it into a pesto….It’s perfect.

2 cups Garlic Scapes roughly chopped

1/2 cup pine nuts

1 cup Parmesan cheese (shredded or small bits)

3/4 cup olive oil

Mix everything in a food processor until smooth. – you can also add a green veggie here to lighten the taste a bit or add some nutrition.  Frozen peas, spinach, or broccoil would all add a nice flavor to this pesto.

Salt and pepper to taste

**Not for the faint of heart.  This has a STRONG garlic flavor.  It’s absoultely perfection baked on a whole wheat pizza dough, topped with creamy goat cheese.

Makes 2 Cups.  I always use a 1/2 cup for Pizza that week, and freeze the rest in plastic 1/2 cup containers.  It’s the perfect size for 1 pizza :)

I stumbled across this last year.   Those baskets were by far my best yet. It gives you a very simple foolproof and customizable “recipe” for creating FABULOUS Containers, window boxes and baskets.

There is a lot going on in the garden right now. Our cold crops seem to be doing fabulously despite a few frosty nights.

If you are looking for a good rhubarb recipe.  Try this Rhubarb Crumb Cake from Smitten Kitchen.  Heavenly!

mmmmm rhubarb.

The strawberries are starting to flower.

strawberry flowers

The blueberry bushes are starting to bud.

The onions we planted from seeds have taken hold and are starting to grow.

onions

Look at all that garlic!! we have at least 80 heads :)

The few lonely asparagus (we HAVE to work on this section of the garden!)

Toady we planted seedlings for Red Cabbage, White Cabbage, Broccoli, kale, and potatoes.

We are trying out the Plangarden.com site this year to plan out the garden… so far so good and it did a fabulous job.

Chaim and I are on vacation, the kids are still in school, and there are no bugs yet in Vermont. So that means yardwork.

Today we tied up the raspberry patch in an attempt to get them back into some sort of order. I think the rope did the trick – we’ll see if it holds.

I also planted the onions. All in all we planted about 40 yellow storage onions, 40 red storage onions, 25 walla wallas, and 25 red onions.

The garlic is up,

and so is the rhubarb.

Some of the plants that bloom in May have really started showing signs of life.

This year we are growing seeds under grow lights for the first time.  So far so good.