Saturday Farmer's Market - 6/15/13

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! 

After an unexpected hiatus last week, I'm back this week with an overload of a farmer's market post!! I have entirely too many things to share with you all from my garden :p Hope you don't mind. I guess I should just hop right on in!

Let's start with the peppers. I've already picked SO MANY peppers off of my plants this year and then I was really sad :( Because when I picked the last peppers off there were no more on ANY of my three plants. Well that only lasted a couple of more days until new bell peppers and jalapenos started growing. Looks like it's going to be quite the good year for peppers!!! I have four bell peppers in my refrigerator right now and at this point I think I'm just going to chop those up and freeze them to use them for seasoning.

The tomatoes are doing fantastic this year too! I've picked ten already this year and every time I start getting sad, thinking that surely the last of the tomatoes are on the bush now, a few more babies pop up :D I only have three tomato plants this year but they've been VERY good to me! I've just been freezing them whole this year, a technique I've never used before. But I'm thinking I shall defrost some soon to make and can some salsa :D

The herbs continue to go CRAZY! Here on the left you can see just a few of them. That's oregano in the front with chives and parsley in the same planter with basil in the back and some mint and rosemary on the side. And on the right is my lemon balm plant which I rescued :) It was SO rootbound and was dying in the container it was in, but I planted it in a nice big container and it's growing to be a nice size now! There is no better smelling herb in my opinion than lemon balm!! I love just running my fingers over it and smelling it :)

The wittle baby orange continues to get bigger! I have a few of these on the tree actually this year :) I just think they're cute :) And they're mighty tasty too! Nothing better than fruit picked straight from the tree!

Flower time! I'm loving seeing all of the flowers come to life in the garden :) Some are just random wildflowers that have come up like the orange cosmo in the middle up there, others are favorite perrenials like my purple coneflower on the left which I REALLY wish would give me more than one flower at a time! And the flowers on the right are on my Ixora bush which I just think are so pretty :)

I'm not entirely sure what this flower on the left is. It's something that's in my wildflower mix. That's the only BAD thing about the wildflower mix I make :p I basically have a giant jar and whenever I get seeds I like I dump them in there :p And then I shake the jar up and will just scatter a handful on top of soil and see what pops up. It's fun :p But then things pop up and I have no clue what they are. From the leaves it almost looks like a really dwarf sunflower? But really I have no clue. The middle picture is my duranta tree which just keeps putting out more and more gorgeous, vanilla scented, purple blossoms that the butterflies love! And finally, more nasturtiums!! Which I absolutely love for their color and for the shape of their leaves too :)

And look! Eggplant flowers too! I just wish they'd hang on :( I've been getting tons of flowers, only none of them will turn into eggplants :( Which I love, but I've just never had any luck growing them. Boooo.

And finally I had to share with you my fiddleleaf fig tree which I am SO proud of :D You may remember just how pathetic this poor plant looked when I bought it. It was the last one left at Home Depot when they had gotten a shipment of them and I had never seen them for sale here but I've always wanted one. I knew this one was the reject of the shipment because it looked pretty sad. But I bought it anyway and said, dammit I'm going to try to nourish it back to health! And while you still see a few leaves that don't look all too great, it's starting to look like a really nice plant finally and I'm kinda in love with it :) It's my baby :)

What's going on in your part of the world garden/nature/food/market wise? Let us know below and come back and see what others are posting about!

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