Homemade Margherita Pizza

Anybody love pizza like I do?! Tonight I have to share a little bit about this yummy homemade Margherita pizza that Trent made a week or so ago. It turned out to be really delicious, and he even used a few veggies from our garden. Here it is pre-baking:

And here it is all done and crispy:

That melty cheese, though.

I made him give me the lowdown on everything he used. Because we all know he's the chef of our household, not me. The crust was a pre-made thin crust, but he made his own sauce. It was just the right amount of sweet and spicy, with fresh ingredients right from the garden.

Here's what he used for the pizza:

-Pre-made crust
-Tomatoes (from the garden)
-Red bell peppers (from the garden)
-Butternut squash (from the garden)
-Garlic (from the garden)
-Salt and pepper
-A bit of crushed red pepper
-Basil leaves
-Fresh Mozzarella

He used the blender to blend the tomatoes and mix in some of the ingredients to make the sauce, and I'm pretty sure he just did it to taste. He doesn't like to follow recipes! He did say he baked it at 425 degrees.

I have to say, I'm ok having to maintain a garden when it comes with perks like yummy pizzas. :)

More Garden Tomatoes

A short garden update today: Tomatoes are growing faster in our veggie garden than we can eat them right now. We picked some more tomatoes this past week, and are still working on eating them. Maybe we should make a salsa or a pasta sauce or something?

We've also picked some sweet corn, but that too has been growing faster than what we can eat. I think we may have planted too much this year. Haha.

Well, if you need me, I'll be working on this here bowl of tomatoes that I only like if they are incorporated into a salad or sandwich or something! :)

Tomato Update

It's Saturday, and I'm hanging at home this weekend! Trent went up to Milwaukee with a couple of friends and will be going to the Cubs/Brewers games tonight and tomorrow. So I'm home with the pup, watching Netflix and cleaning!

And I took a couple of new pics of the garden yesterday, well of the tomato plants anyway. It looks like we'll have lots of tomatoes pretty soon.

I think those are cherry tomatoes above. 

And the below look like the Romas. We have a few more turning red...

We have some big ones growing, too. These things are going to be bigger than my hand pretty soon!

Pretty sure we'll have a much bigger harvest than last year! I'm ready to add some tomatoes to my sandwiches. :)

First Garden Harvest of 2017

It's been a couple of weeks since I blogged all about our recent Michigan trip, but I'm finally popping in for another post, less about traveling and more back to the domestic life! Don't worry though, there will be another travel related post in the near future, as we went back to Chicago for a Cubs game over the weekend. Trent and I are pretty sure Chicago is our second home now, since we have visited the city multiple times this summer!

Today though, I thought I'd share our very first harvest of this year. It's not very big, but we're excited that our tomatoes are finally turning red, and we have been able to enjoy our first veggies from the garden:

Yes, so far we have a lone ear of corn and a couple of tomatoes! So I got to add a couple of slices of fresh tomatoes to my salad the other day that we grew right here in the garden.

We have plenty more veggies that will be ripe soon, too. I actually need to go out to the garden and see what else is ripe, plus take more recent pictures!

The below photos are all from a few weeks ago, but you can see all of the tomatoes that have been growing. Here are the Romas: 

I'd imagine we have many more turning red now. And here was the corn a few weeks ago:

We also have some garlic that grows back every year. We're not really garlic experts though, so we're not sure when garlic is ripe and ready to pick...this looks close though, right??

It definitely smells like garlic, that's for sure.

Well, that's it for now...I'm sure I'll be back with some new posts this weekend!

Container Vegetables

Second post today. Couldn't help myself! Since planting our garden this summer, we've gotten a few other vegetable plants from Trent's family: An eggplant from Mark and Sandy, and a few peppers from his dad.

They've been sitting in the kitchen window for a week or two, so we figured it was about time we planted them. :) Since our garden is pretty full right now, and we had some spare pots in the garage we didn't use, we decided to plant them in the pots instead.

We've never really planted vegetables in containers before, so this is kind of a first. We'll see what happens! It's a little late for planting, but maybe we'll have some veggies by the end of summer or early September.

Here's what we have in the pots:

We have some extra wire caging, so may put some around them just to help keep the pests and any animals away.

We'll see how this container gardening thing goes!

The Garden Is Growing!

It's a beautiful Sunday morning, and we finally have a day to spend at home around the house after a couple of busy weekends in a row. 

Today I'm sharing a few pics of some of our growing plants outside. We haven't gotten too much rain so far this summer, but we've had enough I guess, for some pretty good growth with our flowers and garden vegetables. 

Just look at some of my flower pots in the backyard: 

I've got lots of pretty pink petunias taking off in my pots right now!

The garden has also been growing, much better than last year's. These pictures were actually from a week ago, and since then, I think they've even grown more.

This first row is all tomatoes, and they've pretty much outgrown their cages at this point!

We also have a row of corn growing, as well as some butternut squash and cucumbers. I think it will probably be another month or so at least before we actually get to harvest some vegetables, though.

Last weekend was pretty hot (which is kind of my jam), so I was able to hang out in the yard a little and watch the garden grow. :)

This weekend feels more spring-like, only lower 70s for a high, so we're spending time around the house with the windows open and a nice breeze flowing through the house.

Cheers to a nice Sunday all!

Planting This Year's Garden

Hey guys, what a week! Through the crazy busy-ness that was this past week, we managed to make time to get the garden planted! Trent had to take his truck in to get repaired, so I had to pick him up from work at the end of the week. Then we saw Luke Bryan Friday night, and went to a birthday party yesterday! Today we're finally home again getting things done around the house.

We had gotten the veggies to plant last weekend, but didn't have time to plant them all until Tuesday night. We got it all done just before dark though, and so far it's looking much better than last year's garden at this stage.

We even got some rain this week which helped to get those plants going once they were in the ground. And we're trying a new rabbit-proofing system this year, but I'll get to that a little later. :)

So, on to what we planted. Last year, we went all certified organic and started mostly from seeds. This year, we have a mix of organic and conventional, and are starting mostly from plants.

We have a few different types of tomatoes: organic Red Beefsteak and Husky Cherry Red tomatoes..

Cherokee Purple and Romas..

As well as organic Better Bush tomatoes. We'll see how all of those tomatoes do this year. I think they'll do a little better, since these plants are a bit more mature than those we planted last year.

We have another watermelon plant this year...

Butternut squash, Cucumber...

Red Bell Peppers, and Sweet Potatoes! We're kind of excited about these sweet potato plants. This might be the first time we've done them, though I can't remember for sure.

And finally, we did get a couple of seed packets. Sweet corn and these interesting Kaleidoscope carrots that Trent picked out...I'm not sure about these, but we will see how they are I guess!

Trent did the majority of the digging and planting, while I got the plants out of their containers and prepared them to be put into the ground. Many of the containers we got were actually the decomposable kind that you have to soak first, remove the wrappers, and cut the bottoms off before planting. Then you leave the decomposable paper containers around the plants when you put them into the ground. This is supposedly to help the plant with transplant shock.

We had old tomato cages from previous years that we put around the plants.

The garden space we have out back is pretty large, so we were able to space out the plants pretty far apart this year, which is especially nice for the cucumbers that tend to spread out quite a bit.

The tomatoes are on the far left end, followed by the cucumber plant, peppers, and butternut squash. Then there's the row of sweet potatoes, and a couple of rows of corn and carrots, then a mound for the watermelon.

We also finally got to plant my wildflower seeds at the end of the garden. I'm excited to see if these will grow into beautiful flowers this summer!

Now, here is the rabbit-proofing method we decided on for this year's garden: We got a roll of chicken coop wire, about $10 at Lowe's. Then cut sections of it and wrapped them around each of the plants we put into the ground. 

We are hoping this will prevent little critters from getting in there and eating our veggie plants, which happened quite a bit last year!

We'll probably take these barriers off once the plants get larger and established, to make room for them to grow. I think we had about 15 total plants to wrap the wire caging around.

It was getting dark by the time we finished all of our cages, but they're all done!

We ran the hose out back after finishing up, and started the sprinkler on them for a little while, just to make sure the soil got nice and wet.

Then Saleen wanted to check out the garden, too. I think she approved, though her face said she wasn't quite sure...

I'm glad the planting stage is all over! Now our next step is just to put down a little weed preventer, pull the inevitable weeds this summer, and wait for our tiny plants to grow into some yummy veggies! Should be a better crop than last year's!

Flowers In Planters

Summer has started early this year! Man, it was a hot one this past weekend. We picked up a bunch of flowers at Lowe's on Saturday, and since we were home all day Sunday, I decided I would plant them all in my pots. 

As soon as I started planting - in the sun, in black cut-off leggings and a t-shirt - I realized it was much hotter than I expected! I went in and changed to shorts and a tank top, which was much more appropriate for the heat. We even had to pick up our new living room air conditioner this weekend (the old one bit the dust last year), because it was about 85 degrees yesterday, and is supposed to be even hotter today. That hot weather came up pretty quickly!

But despite the heat, I got all of my flowers transplanted into pots. This year, I planted a total of 14 pots to put outside around the house. All of the pots I used were leftover from previous years, and I even have more I didn't use!

I also didn't have to buy any new soil, fertilizer, or flower food. I was able to use all of the soil leftover inside the pots, which was nice. So all I had to do was plant the flowers!

This year I planted Petunias and Dusty Miller. Those two always do really well for me, so I'm sticking to them! I did also end up getting a few Celosia (not pictured) for one of the planters, but the flowers look very "stemmy"- I'm hoping they spread out a little more. Usually the celosia I get is shorter, so I'm waiting to see what they do.

I stuck with the same flowers as last year for these big planters by the garage. These planters were leftover from the wedding, and we just kept them to plant flowers in every year by the house.

I realize now looking at the below picture of the planter from an "above angle", that I could have spaced out those petunias a little more in the front. Oh well! These guys usually spread out pretty well. :)

I'll have to share more pictures of the pots on the front porch and around the house, especially once they start growing and taking over their assigned pots. They are usually over-flowing by July!

We are hoping to get the vegetable garden all planted this week. We didn't have time over the weekend, but have gotten all of our veggie plants for it. Will share those pictures once we get our veggies in the ground - and a rabbit control system in place! Last year was a doozy. ;)

Rainy Days and Mondays

So it's not Monday - It's Saturday, but it's a rainy one today! April showers bring May flowers though, right? I'm just popping in while we're at home watching the Cubs game. We were supposed to get our new dishwasher delivered today (I ordered it online from Lowe's a couple of weeks ago, and it just came in), but they weren't able to deliver it until Wednesday. That didn't work for us, because we are both gone during the week working. SO..the plan was to go to town today to pick it up instead.

So right now we're still at home, waiting for the rain to slow down so we can finally pick up our dishwasher. (It's been pouring for hours now) I'm ready to get a new one, since our current one has been leaking every time we run it. It gets the kitchen floor soaking wet, so we have to put a bazillion towels down in order to run it! It's a rollaway dishwasher, too, as is the new one, since we don't yet have a hook-up in our kitchen for one.

Meanwhile, I've also been waiting for a nice day to plant these wildflowers that I got in the mail recently:

Did anyone else sign up on the Cheerios website to get wildflower seeds? It's part of their Bring Back the Bees promotion. I thought it would be fun to do!

Trent's dad just tilled up the garden last weekend for us, but since then it's been pretty rainy and chilly, so we haven't been able to plant them back there yet. I'm still itching to get some flowers for my pots, too. 

Next week, we leave for Ohio on Thursday! Trent will be a groomsman in his cousin Aaron's wedding. We are super excited to see everyone again and hang out for a few days. 

Ok, continuing to wait for the rain to slow... will keep you updated!