Saturday Farmer's Market - 5/25/13

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! 

It's finally starting to become harvest time here in Southern Louisiana!! I know I'm being a total tease to some of you all as some of you are just now being able to work the ground where you are :p What's interesting about moving this year to the northshore of southern Louisiana is that I get to see what even just a 10 degree normal difference in weather makes!! My mom is harvesting more vegetables than me already and she lives just 30 minutes south of me. But it's about 10 degrees warmer on average down there. She's picked five tomatoes already though! And more are ripening :p I have two already though :p

This may be a bit of a boring Saturday Farmer's Market but I didn't have time to take pictures before work :p So you'll be getting a lot of indoor pictures this go around, aside from one glorious outdoor picture from a few days ago that I've already shared on instagram and tumblr, but even if you saw it already, it's worth sharing again because I'm so in love with it!

That's the first of my gorgeous tiger lilies to open!!! These lilies have been slowly growing for months now and I had no idea what type of lilies they were. Then they finally started to grow buds and I still had no clue what they were going to look like when they opened up. In fact, I thought they'd be white. Then one morning I went outside and this beauty was waiting for me. UGH! It's so gorgeous!! And I have tons of them!! I don't want them to ever die. They're just so gorgeous!! When I get a house I'm putting in a whole bed of these I think :p

So here is my very small harvest so far :p Two tomatoes, four GIANT jalapenos (! I'm so glad they're growing so  big this year!) and a bunch of herbs drying in paper bags right now. It's just me this year enjoying the fruits of my labor, so I'm freezing and drying everything that I can right now until I need it. One of the beautiful things about tomatoes is that you can freeze them whole!! So I'm just dropping them whole into a gallon sized ziploc bag until I'm ready to make some pico de gallo or some salsa (mmm...yes, must make a huge batch of restaurant style salsa that I can put up in jars!) or some homemade tomato sauce. I might pickle some more jalapenos even though I still have two jars from last year, and I'll DEFINITELY be stuffing some with cream cheese and bacon :P My favorite way to eat them :p And I'll use some for cooking too! I love jalapenos!! My herbs were getting completely out of control, so I decided to chop them all to the ground and dry what had grown and put them into jars and they're already coming back like crazy!! Love my little herb garden :D

Next up is my cherry liqueur which is starting to look more like a liqueur :D Though it still has a month and a half to go until it's finished. I'm having fun watching the progress of this and dreaming up new liqueurs I can make in the future! My friend who gave me the recipe of how to make this gave me another recipe for a Christmas liqueur but I'm thinking of winging my own based on flavors that I think might go well together. I can't WAIT to taste the finished product of this :D It's super easy to make!! If you have berries growing in your yard, try it out or next time you visit your friendly farmer's market, pick up a couple of pounds of your favorite berries or cherries and try this out :)

This little plant has made me a very happy camper lately :) It's my fiddleleaf fig tree that looked like it was on it's last leg when I bought it. Seriously. I should've taken a picture of just how bad it looked when I bought it. Because it still doesn't look great here, but it looks like it's a prize winning plant based on when I first bought it :p These are just such gorgeous plants!!! And I've wanted one for so long but can never find them to buy. Home Depot had them and when I went back to get one they only had one left. And the poor plant looked like it was going to go in the garbage if no one bought it, so I rescued it and have been nursing it :p I thought I was fighting a losing battle but look! It's starting to look good :D YAY :D

Here's another little plant that I was nervous about that's doing well!!! This is the little Red Robin Tomato grow kit that I bought from Barnes and Noble! I love this little kit and all the little kits they were selling there :) Everything you need is included and you grow the plants right in the bag which you get to color :) This tomato was grown from a seed and I didn't know if it would make it. But it's making it and looks really good now!! It's the only houseplant variety of tomato out there! It's an heirloom tomato and will eventually (hopefully) give me some yummy little cherry tomatoes :D

And finally, YAY!...look closely...see right in the middle there? That's going to be an avocado tree :p And this is why I love gardening so much. This picture just about sums it up. You put an avocado pit in water and wait patiently (VERY patiently) for months and eventually this little tiny thing finally shows itself, and that little thing will soon be a branch which will eventually make some leaves and eventually I'll have a tree which will grow many feet  tall and hopefully give me tons of avocados. Never ceases to amaze me, the wonders of nature :)

So how does your garden grow this week? Or what you up to as far as good food in your life? What are you doing to live life a little bit more sustainably? Is your farmer's market open yet and have you visited? Do you have favorite gardening memories as a child? Or a favorite nursery that you want to tell us all about? There are so many things to share a post about! So spread the gardening love :D And leave your link in the Mr. Linky below :)

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