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If you asked me what a perfect day would look like, yesterday was certainly it.
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My day started off with a 3 mile run followed by some core work, push-ups, and at-home yoga. I didn’t have much time, but I cranked out this well-rounded workout in 40 minutes.
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After showering and breakfast, Eric and I headed to the always fun Aberfoyle Antique market. It was supposed to rain all day, but it held off all morning. I love pleasant surprises with the forecast.
This antique market is huge and it has some great finds. Tons of gorgeous hand-crafted furniture, that is out of our budget right now!
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I was on the hunt for photography props and I came home with a bag full. :)
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I got a bag of things for just $20!
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We ran some errands after that- Home Depot & Home Hardware for a couple tools for Eric and Whole Foods for groceries, lunch, and organic gardening seeds.
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I had basically every vegan protein salad from Whole Foods that I could cram into my box. It was wonderful!
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Non-tripod, shaky-hand, fuzzy pictures ensued. ;)
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Eric had a tomato & cheese pizza pie. It looked a bit weak to me!
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Mentionable purchases from Whole Foods:
- Dried Mango (yessssss)
- Live granola (will be making this on the blog soon)
- Organic kale
- Frozen pitted sour cherries (they don’t have frozen sweet cherries…why?)
- Epsom salts
- purple garlic
- 360 Woven wheat crackers
- Full of Fruit Coconut Popsicles
- Mason D’Orphee organic delicate EVOO
After that we hit up another nursery to finish getting the plants & pots I needed. The kale and such are not ‘certified organic’, but I was told the local grower doesn’t use pesticides.
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On the way home, the sun came out to reveal a beautiful, warm day! What a great long weekend this has turned out to be.
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And then it was time to plant the veggie garden…it was G-day or bust.
I got my trusty garden plan that I drew out after consulting Wiki’s info on Companion Planting. I tried to plant everything near other companion plants so they would have the best chance of surviving my black thumb!!
My plan is all mucked up right now, but I hope to re-draw it and post it on the blog soon.
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Thanks to Karly, I had these wonderful stakes to use!
The first thing I did was set the plants and bags of seeds directly onto the soil so I could visualize where everything was going to be on the two beds.
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I previously looked up the spacing requirements for each plant, so after I did this I got a ruler and roughly measured the spacing for each. It took me so much longer than I anticipated to lay everything out.
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At this point, our lovely neighbours came over and gave us a big barrel of local Mushroom compost! I moved the plants off, added some in, and then tilled the soil to mix it in.
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They also gave us that curly pole that we will use for our tomato plant. Apparently you can buy these at Dollarstore for much cheaper than Home Depot.
We had lots of triple mix leftover which was a great thing because we needed it for the potted plants.
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Initially, we were going to put the 3 tomato plants in the beds, but we ran out of room (thanks to my little kale obsession). We moved the pots to a sunny area by the other side of the house.
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I checked and double checked my plan and tried to squeeze everything in! We had to place a few things closer together than we wanted to, but I’m sure it will work out just fine…or not.
Do not be fooled by my smile, I have no idea what I’m doing!!
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Here’s what I planted in the 2 beds:
- Carrots (seed)
- beets (seed)
- peas (seed)
- Scallion (seed)
- 3 bell pepper plants
- 1 banana pepper plant
- 2 Spanish onion plants
- 1 red onion plant
- 20 kale plants
- 10 romaine plants
- 12 spinach plants
- 4 sugar snap pea plants
- a few garlic cloves
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Do you think I will kill everything? I sure hope not!
Last night we had a brief thunderstorm and pouring rain and I sat up in bed and said, ‘MY POOR PLANTS!’
I checked on them first thing this morning, and they survived. ;)
Herbs!
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In pots:
- 2 Beefsteak tomato plants
- 1 roma tomato plant
- Curley parsley
- flat parsley
- Mint
- Rosemary
- Dill
- Basil (need to get another pot first!)
I’m actually worried that these pots won’t be big enough for the herbs! What do you think?
The gardening took a solid 3 hours with a couple what-have-i-gotten-myself-into moments. ;)
I also planted these Lilies in the front garden that were birthday gifts from Eric.
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Eric and the guys also finished the entire base of the deck on Saturday.
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I’m so impressed! There are 3 sets of stairs and all the railings left. Still lots of work yet, but it is coming along wonderfully.
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Around 8pm, we finally came in famished for dinner. I had no idea what to make, so I decided to just throw a bunch of things in a skillet and see where it took me. :) The best kind of meal, I say.
Appetizer was roasted red pepper hummus and Baked Woven thins (just whole wheat and salt as the ingredients).
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The first thing I did was cook a grain because that takes the longest. I cooked up about 3/4 cup of speltberries on the stovetop.
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Based on what I had in my kitchen, I decided to make a Speltberry chickpea veggie stirfry, infused with lemon, Thyme, and Rosemary.
Check out the fun shot we got using the GOLD reflector disc. Eric held the gold disc to reflect the sun and it made for a cool picture in an otherwise dark kitchen.
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I didn’t measure anything, so the recipe below is a rough estimate of what I made.
[print_this]
Easy Speltberry Chickpea Veggie Stir-fry
Yield: 2-3 servings
Ingredients: (only rough measurements!)
- 3/4 cup raw speltberries
- 1 small can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
- 1 sweet onion
- 2 large garlic cloves
- extra virgin olive oil, for sautéing
- 1 red pepper
- 1 orange pepper
- 1 chopped carrot
- 3 handfuls spinach
- Juice of half a lemon
- 1 tsp dried Thyme
- 1 tbsp fresh finely chopped rosemary
- Herbamare, kosher salt, black pepper, all to taste
Directions:
1. Cook speltberries in a pot of water for about 25-30 minutes until tender, but still chewy.
2. Meanwhile, sauté the chopped onion and garlic in a a large skillet with some oil for several minutes on low-medium.
3. Now add in the chopped peppers and carrot and saute for another 5-7 minutes on low. Add in the lemon juice, Thyme, and rosemary and stir well.
4. Stir in the spinach and sauté until wilted. Now season to taste using salt, pepper, and optional Herbamare.
5. Stir in drained and rinsed chickpeas and cooked speltberries. Heat through and serve immediately. Season to taste. Makes 2-3 servings.
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In under 30 minutes, I had whipped up a great meal. I wasn’t expecting much from this, but we both loved it. The lemon, Thyme, and rosemary combo was lovely.
On today’s agenda, we have more yard work to accomplish (I still need to weed the front and back flower beds) and we’re going to put some chicken wire around the garden beds so all our cute little bunnies around here don’t eat all my KALE!! Luckily, it looks like the weather will hold up again today. Tonight, we have a BBQ with a few friends to end the long weekend. It should be a good one.
If you are enjoying the holiday Monday, Happy Victoria Day to you!
what a perfect day! your yard and deck look gorgeous! i took today off and i am headed to get flowers for our garden after a nice bike ride…..enjoy victoria day and i will celebrate in spirit here in the us :)
What a perfect weekend im so jealous of your gardens, all of my plants are in pots and im so nervous I will kill them all. Your stir fry looks amazing meals I just throw together often end up being my favorites. Enjoy your bbq tonight and hopefully some gorgeous weather!!
that sounds like a lovely day ended with the perfect meal! I love days like that :) Gardening can be a lot of work! I am tired just reading about it haha.
I can see why this was a perfect day :) Have a great week — and Happy Victoria Day!
Your garden/deck look beautiful! I have been wanting to start an herb garden myself for a while but I’m afraid to because I don’t have much space.. This post makes me think I still might be able to! Oh, andthe speltberry chickpea salad also looks amazing.
We ran out of time this weekend to get planting and such done — hopefully we can get going on things this coming weekend!
Good luck with your plants. I also have a black thumb and hope to turn it green this summer with my garden.
Your vegetable garden is looking great! That deck is really coming along too.
Wow that really does look like a perfect day! I love yalls planter beds too…fantastic job!
Wow, what a productive Sunday! We had about the same too. I love all of the blogging props you bought! I can’t wait to see more of them. I’d never thought to go to an antique store for props, brilliant! Have a great holiday Monday :)
The garden is coming along so well! I’m happy to hear you had such a great weekend.
Did you end up finding the plants you bought yesterday as organics? Like the kale and stuff.
If so what nursery were you able to find that at? I’m having trouble finding organic veggie plants myself
They weren’t ‘certified organic’ but I was told that the local grower does not used pesticides :) From Jade Gardens I think it was called?
We got a bunch of certified organic from taylor nursery and organic seeds from whole foods.
Ahh, the garden is so exciting! I love my own little porch-garden, but I’m lusting after a yard with good sun.
A word of advice for the pots: make sure the tomatoes have a LOT of root space, as they are greedy and like lots of room for their feet. I used big pots for mine. I have made the mistake of planting more than one tomato plant in the same container – don’t do that either! They’re very competitive plants and they won’t like that either :) They may grow seemingly okay at first in smaller pots but remember, if you wants lots of healthy tomatoes, they need lots of space!
The herbs looks like they will be fine, they usually fill out wherever they are and they don’t have deep roots.
My favorite resource for planting are the books Grow Great Grub and You Grow Girl, both by Gayla Trail. They’re SO good, and removed a lot of my own fear from planting my own food.
Happy growing! :)
thanks!!
Whole Foods…gardening…it definitely sounds like a perfect day! My husband and I live in an apartment, so we obviously can’t have a huge garden. We did plan beets, radishes, jalapenos and onions in some planters last weekend.
sounds like an awesome day!!! can’t wait to see how your garden turns out! :D
I love the mismatched pots your herbs are in. The diversity creates a strange unity. Your backyard is gorgeous already!
My speltberries are in the slow cooker as we speak! And I’m headed off to the Junction to go antiquing right now. Hope you have a nice relaxing holiday Monday Angela! (Enough with all this productivity, sheesh ;))
Your garden is going to be beautiful! I’m jealous- I live in an apartment with a tiny porch that gets no sun. Last year we tried potted plants but nothing did very well… This year I purchased a CSA instead!
This does look like a perfect day! The antique market looks like a lot of fun, I’ve never been rummaging before. Glad to see this kind of update from you!
You and I need to go to Whole Foods and create amazing salad combos – anytime I treat myself to their salad bar it’s a mish mash of exactly what you had, sadly the reason being that I can’t get organized enough to have those ingredients on hand to make the salads in the first place!! :)
Also wanted to add that it’s a dreary day where I am, and just working through some crappy crap at the moment and this post made me feel more sunshiney – thanks Angela!
Oh, and mint supposedly takes right over, so maybe you will need a bigger pot? I need to start my tiny apartment herb garden soon!
Your garden looks great! It makes me so happy to see people gardening in their back yards! I thought it was going to go extinct for a second :)