Saturday Farmers Market! 5/18/13

Saturday Farmers Market is a weekly event originally created by the beautiful and nature loving, Heather at Capricious Reader. It's a weekly event that celebrates gardening, be it your own garden or gardens around you; local food, be that at your local farmers market or at a restaurant or festival that celebrates eating locally; a recipe that you've created using fresh ingredients or a whole cookbook; and veggies, flowers, herbs and farm goods galore. Anyone and everyone can participate. It was originally started within the book blogging community but I'd love to see it expand beyond as well. You don't have to have a garden or grow veggies to participate, just post about how veggies, flowers, local farms, etc. have impacted your life this week. You'd be surprised! It may be too cold to grow things and it may be too hot to grow things, but you may just want to post about the plans you have for when the ground thaws. Or maybe even share with us how your community aims to keep things more sustainable or even about the local trails and nature offerings around you! This will also connect really well with Mrs. Beth Fish's Weekend Cooking ;) Thanks Heather for letting me take over the reigns for this wonderful idea that spawned from your creative brain :) Feel free to leave the link to your post in the Mr. Linky below, spread the word, and come back to read everyone else's posts as well! 

Hey lovelies! Hope you've all had a wonderful week! Mine's been crazy and hectic, but I'm not here to talk about that! I'm here to talk about veggies and flowers and herbs :) The things that give me a little bit of happiness every time I'm around them. And there's only one more day of work and then my weekend is here finally! Lots of growth going on in the garden! It's getting to really be grow time down here in Southern Louisiana!

In flower news, the lilies have grown as tall as me! And that's about five feet nine inches tall. They're getting to the point where they're about to open and I can't WAIT to see what they look like :) These are a giant teaser :p It's been about two to three months of gradual growth to get to this point so it better be a big pay off :p The freesias that are surrounding them in the planter are all dying off now, so they will be the new star of the pot that they're in.

There are plenty of other stars in the garden too when it comes to flowers right now :) The african daisies are continuing to come back now that I've moved them to a sunnier spot. In the middle is a pink cosmo that has come up! I keep a jar of wildflower seeds. I like to buy random packets of wildflowers every now and then and dump the seeds in the jar and shake it up so I don't know what's in there and then sprinkle them on some soil and be surprised by what comes up :D So I sprinkled some in a pot and this is the first flower to bloom. I can see that there will be some zinnias and black eyed susans by the leaves too...but don't know how well they'll do all crowded in the pot. We'll see! And the last picture are the pretty purple flowers that I forgot the name of along with some nasturtium leaves that haven't flowered yet. I do love their leaves though :)

The herbs are continuing to do super fantastic!! I cut them back a few weeks ago which reminds me that I have to check on those herbs that I have drying out right now! Still have tons of basil, the mint is growing like crazy, the parsley and oregano have come back with a vengeance and the chives are just out of control :p The little seeds I planted are not doing so well though...may have to restart those and start them inside first instead of direct sowing them outdoors. The seeds that haven't come up are chamomile, feverfew and stevia.

I'm SO happy with my pepper plants this year!!! They're all doing really good! But especially these bell peppers which are the giant bells. I think this may be the first year that I ever have bell peppers which are ACTUALLY big enough to use for stuffing! I'm so excited about these and they look gorgeous :D I've also been picking jalapenos daily already! I've just been freezing them until I decide what I want to do with them. I usually stuff a bunch of them and last year I pickled and canned a bunch too.

Here is just a very small sampling of the many tomatoes I have growing right now :D They're always the pride and joy of my garden and I'm so happy with how well they're doing this year! Last year for some reason I had really bad luck with tomatoes. It was also my first year patio gardening though so I have another year experience under my belt. I'm looking at the tomatoes and the jalapenos and picturing the salsa that will be made already :D

 

And finally, the fruit trees :) I have five fruit trees actually! Not picture here are a dwarf meyer lemon and a dwarf key lime which are both looking awesome! The first two trees here are ones I've grown from seed. And they'll probably never produce great tasting fruit because I didn't graft them, but I still love them :p The problem is I don't know which is which :p I know that one of them is a lemon tree (which usually has spikes but they BOTH have spikes) and the other is the "Max tree", grown from a fruit pit that Debi's son Max gave me. I have no clue what kind of fruit that tree is though, lol. So it's just going to be a mystery fruite :p The last tree is my orange tree! Which looks gorgeous and as you can see in this picture I'm going to get a few oranges this year :D Some of the little flowers left behind baby oranges that are teeny tiny but slowly getting bigger. So come October/November, I should have some oranges from my tree :D Yay!!

So what's going on in your garden right now? What's going on at your farmer's market or in your neighborhood? Have you visited your local nursery recently and want to tell us all about it? Read a good book about gardening or nature? Tell us all about it and feel free to leave a link in the Mr. Linky below and come back to see what others are talking about :) And have a great weekend!!

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